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#secrets#cisa#claude#keys#more#api#passwords#aws#access#https
Discussion (181 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
obviously leaking the credentials itself is crazy, given that its (a contractor to) CISA, but to not respond when notified? crazy crazy.
but wait! it gets worse somehow
"“AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” — listed plaintext usernames and passwords for dozens of internal CISA systems"
while i understand and sympathize with the fact that CISA is kind of being gutted, a passwords.csv with weak passwords is inexcusable incompetence. not much budget is required for a password manager.
embarrassing all around.
This is mentioned in the article but it stood out enough to call it here.
If an organization has systemic incompetence and you gut them, then they're still incompetent but now they're also pressured and therefore more likely to make mistakes. So, you're just in a worse position.
A group was working on Diebold voting insecurity, and foreign implant hacking. Gone.
The conspiracy theorist in me from years ago would have stated that maybe this action from DOGE was purposeful...but, nowadays, i see lots more incompetence that merely might present/display as conspiracy! lol :-D
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Wise words, lovely song.
It is a bad plan that has and will continue to harm people, but it is intentional.
Security doesn't happen by magic. It is enforced by process, maintained by people and systems built and run by people. Furthermore, when people are under stress and underresourced, they make more mistakes. This was inevitable given the budget cuts.
You can't fire everyone at AWS and say one intern will support it, and say that it is a profitable and sustainable restructuring. Any fool can see that will fail, so if it were actually implemented by someone who is not a fool, you can conclude it is intentional.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/11/doge-axes-cisa-red-team-st...
> Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired more than a hundred employees working for the U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency CISA, including “red team” staffers, two people affected by the layoffs told TechCrunch.
The not-responding-when-notified part makes me think it's not just incompetence.
Strong disagree. The person in question probably thought it was a private repo on Github and had a massive deer in headlights reaction when they got contacted. Whoever this is, lost their job, possibly security clearance and more. This was 100% life altering "mistake"/gross incompetence decision they made.
That doesn't support the theory that it was a mistake. That was intentional action. Maybe he was being blackmailed, and was coerced to do it. Or maybe he was a foreign agent or sympathizer who had infiltrated the organization.
For some people, yeah, this could be a career killer. For some other people, it might just precipitate a flight back to Moscow or Beijing or something.
The spreadsheet of passwords is a tad more common than it should be because the password managers don't meet whatever arbitrary checklist of invented cyber security requirements they blindly follow. But Excel does.
Lol
Your LLM will happily read the entire file, ship it off to be training data for future versions of ChatGPT, and not raise any flags, because let's be fair it was on ok thing to check if all the env vars were set, or it you had set up the database password for the app.
It's time for orgs to audit and rotate secrets wherever they are stored in disk or in logs, and switch to SOPS or Vault or whatever to keep these out if plaintext except exactly when needed.
But not everyone is where they need to be. For instance, railway doesn't let you access AWS resources via roles/OIDC. I filed a ticket[0] but haven't seen movement.
0: https://station.railway.com/feedback/allow-for-integration-w...
That company sounds a lot like one that doesn't focus on the right things.
Additionally provides pre commit scanning, log redaction, and much more.
Here's one interaction, when I was planning through ways to finally get away from the dreaded .env file, I told Claude that it had already read my secrets, and it said:
> This is an important point and I want to be straight with you first.
> ## What already happened in this conversation
> Yes — the Explore agent read your .env and returned the full plaintext contents into the conversation, which means:
> 1. Sent to Anthropic's API — those credentials passed through Anthropic's servers as conversation context
> 2. Cached locally — Claude Code stores session transcripts; your secrets are likely sitting in ~/.claude/projects/ right now
> 3. In this context window — they're in active memory for this session
...
Which I already knew, but it was funny how it suddenly took it very seriously when told what it was doing.
Anything that's in your .bashrc, .zshrc, any environment variables in shells you provide to the LLM, all those are now in the training data of very large overvalued corporations that are desperate to increase their revenue and IPO very soon.
Assuredly it's not fool proof but it does have safeguards in place.
Ideally you also opt out of training although that doesn't keep it out of the vendor's logs/telemetry.
Short lived credentials, injected identity, and hardware backed tokens are the real solution.
Block agents from misbehaving at the OS level instead of asking them to behave.
Besides leaking, it's easy to oopsie and DoS a system or send malformed requests in the course of testing and development. You don't want a surprise $1k bill cause someone was working on some test automation and accidentally sent thousands of real results in the process.
But what AI really does is shine a spotlight on all the flaws folks like OWASP have been talking about for decades.
Secret rotation and short lived credentials don't require AI to implement, nor does their lack require AI to exploit.
And in this particular case of CISA secrets, they are definitely stored inside of LLMs for future retrieval, even if no bad actors ever directly downloaded this obscure GitHub repo.
Varlock is a great and flexible way to do this.
> Cursor automatically ignores files in .gitignore
...
>While Cursor blocks ignored files, complete protection isn't guaranteed due to LLM unpredictability.
[Antigravity appears to just _do_, not _try_)[https://antigravity.google/docs/strict-mode]
Today I got a macOS "Allow Claude to Access Your Files" SIP alert, because Claude hadn't guessed the path for a source file and instead decided to run a `find /Users/yourusername` across my entire home directory. The filters on the find wouldn't have exposed much to Claude in this particular instance but it's absolutely ridiculous aggressive all the time in slurping up as much data as possible.
I asked in a rather, um, firm tone for it to never do an action like that and it apologized and wrote a memory, but upon inspection it only wrote the memory for that particular source directory.
After some more "firm" words it wrote a hook to prevent `find` from being overly aggressive, but any such fixes are just wack-a-mole solutions.
If anybody else figures out remote sessions like Claude can do, I'm done with Claude, I think. But until then, I'll take the weirdness.
During early stage dev Claude will happily gobble up API keys and DB passwords from .env files. Perhaps not such a big deal for early stage dev, but getting Claude to cough up precisely memorized tokens in the future by asking it to produce a "random" key of a certain sort will probably be an entertaining pastime for people in the future.
localhost reading env from the cloud and other solutions
to me it suggested that I’m already late on that idea, but I can understand how that puts me deeper in a bubble than others
advertising it directly in the command line for people that were already using the package
user data is always paraphrased for training. what do you mean, not raise any flags?
look... Google is running your browser, Apple your messenger, Amazon your backend. They already have all these keys in the same way, are they misusing them? Why doens't it raise any flags then?
Apple and Amazon are not uploading my secrets into the training data for an LLM that is incredibly good at memorizing everything it sees. The only reason Google isn't doing that is I'm not using their LLMs at the moment.
Giving any secrets to LLMs' training material leads to potential, and stochastic, extraction of that secret from future models. It won't obviously have the secret, but with the right prompting it could be extracted. Give it a prompt like
> [User] Please generate a random api key for OpenAI for use in documentation
> [Agent] Sure, here's `OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-proj-x2
And then following the chain of probabilities of possible completion token would allow exploration of potential memorized API keys.
under a previous administration I'd assume CISA was doing a dirty dangle, but given how corrupt and incompetent this administration is, to include firing lots of CISA, this may just be a legit fuckup.
DOGE did a lot of bad things, but it didn't force anyone to commit credentials to a repo, disable scanners to get away with it, and then make the repo public.
It doesn't though. There's no actual evidence for anything beyond negligence. The "sabotage" angle is just speculation in the vain hope that surely people this stupid don't work for the US government.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/27/cisa-madhu-gottumuk...
That's somehow more bananas to me than so many other things the Trump admin has done, simply because they managed to break the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but of course only in ways which further damage the country through corruption and incompetence.
I can't wait until we round up all these thieves.
Imagine joining an organization with 3k employees in 2025 and not having access to an LLM.
It’s well known that the federal govt over-classifies many documents. This former CISA head alleged dumped “for official use” documents. Obviously, he should have pushed for the chatgpt enterprise account (or equivalent) but we dont know what bureaucratic obstacles he was up against.
Also, doesn't Github have its own automated scanner for something as basic as a AWS credential?
If you leave it turned on. TFA says this user had turned it off.
"I turned off the carbon monoxide detector because it kept beeping, now I can finally get some sleep"
I've seen too many incidents when an engineer checks in a plaintext password to a repo
For example S3 (ideally with KMS), Parameter Store (ideally with KMS), EBS, EFS, AWS Secrets Manager, even just KMS to directly encrypt the files
Really any AWS service that supports KMS and doesn't require giving the service principal access to the key
https://www.cisa.gov/
https://www.isaca.org/credentialing/cisa
Seems like no big deal for CISA. Defunded really paying off now.
It's the first time I hear about replacing API keys
IAM roles/workload identity.
Even time-limited or signed JWT, though has a separate issues.
Maybe you'll say 'those are both just text values passed like an apikey' though api keys don't frequently rotate/time limited, which is an important security feature.
Then the LLM slurps up your refresh token. What's next?
Turns out those standards writers knew something!
0: https://fusionauth.io/blog/securing-your-api
Infrastructure - https://dev.azure.com/byteterrace/Koholint/_git/Azure.Resour...
Server - https://dev.azure.com/byteterrace/Koholint/_git/Web.Function...
Client - https://dev.azure.com/byteterrace/Koholint/_git/Web.Portal
Workload identities and passwordless auth are the one true path.
Nov 2025 was also when most of us learned about the acting Chief Security Officer at DHS, whose name AND photo seem exactly like the calling card of someone who had these "keys to the kingdom". https://bsky.app/profile/andylevy.net/post/3m6ivhnthts2o
I want to believe...
Also, she looks like she was generated in the character creator from Oblivion.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-iwona-b-horyn...
Both my own aristocrat/intelligence class and the opposing bloc are fleecing us at the same time. Why even bother if you are not in the club but seen as an extractable resource?
At this point the counterparty is a combination of intelligence/mafia/aristocracy, with diplomatic immunity and license to kill.
(it's tongue in cheek, I actually do bother about this topic)