Revision 4 of NIST’s operational technology security guide is open for public comments until November 30.
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The decision follows BOD 26-04, which directs federal organizations to prioritize vulnerabilities based on real-world risk.
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Complementing Zero Trust models, decoys enable organizations to detect, observe, and block malicious activity in their environments.
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GitLab released emergency patches Thursday for two high-severity flaws in its software development platform, one of them holding the highest possible severity score, while a security firm reports that it has already seen attackers probing the internet for the flaws.
The company patched the issues in new versions of both its Community Edition and Enterprise Edition, and urged those that use self-managed installations to upgrade as soon as possible. GitLab said its own hosted service already runs the fixed code, and that customers of its single-tenant Dedicated offering are not impacted.
The more serious of the two flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-85706, sits in the interface that handles repository commits. GitLab said that under certain conditions an attacker could read any file on the server, because the code failed to confine file paths properly and did not enforce authentication. An attacker does not need an account nor credentials to take advantage of the flaw.
The vulnerability affects every release from 18.7 up to 19.1.8, along with the 19.2 and 19.3 lines before this week’s patches. GitLab assigned it a CVSS score of 10.0, the top of the scale used across the industry.
The second flaw, CVE-2026-87719, affects only GitLab’s Enterprise Edition. The company says a logged-in user with Duo Chat access could hide a command inside an ordinary request, prompting the server to look up its own settings for the software’s Advanced Search feature, which would return the settings and passwords being held. It affects releases from 18.3 onward and carries a CVSS score of 9.9.
WatchTowr Labs wrote in a LinkedIn post Friday that it was already watching probes against the path traversal flaw, which it said an attacker can trigger in one HTTP request. The firm said organizations running self-hosted GitLab servers reachable from the open internet face the greatest risk, and pointed defenders toward their logs, suggesting they look for POST requests to addresses under /api/v4/projects/{id}/repository/commits/ that carry a file.path parameter.
Drawing on earlier GitLab flaws, the firm said broad, untargeted attacks tend to follow soon after a patch appears.
“Based on recent GitLab vulnerabilities, we know the time until indiscriminate exploitation is likely not far away,” the post read.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list on Friday afternoon.
You can find more information about the vulnerabilities on GitLab’s website.
Update: Sept. 11, 2026; 4:30 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect the vulnerability being added to CISA’s KEV list.
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The U.S. government is accusing Chinese AI companies of engaging in a deliberate and “systematic” effort to illegally distill U.S. frontier AI models and their capabilities.
According to a joint cybersecurity advisory from the National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI, the sheer scale of these efforts since 2024 indicate that distillation is a critical part of China’s AI industrial policy.
“China-based artificial intelligence companies are conducting systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. AI companies’ models through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns that form the core—not merely a supplement—of their AI development strategy,” the agencies wrote.
The advisory names Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI, saying they spent billions of tokens across millions of exchanges and requests with frontier U.S. AI models like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and xAI’s Grok, since at least late 2024.
The U.S. agencies said the companies used data culled from these interactions to strengthen their own domestic models, a practice that is tacitly encouraged but not directed by political leaders in Beijing.
DeepSeek, for example, distilled frontier U.S. models to generate synthetic training data for its R1 and R3 models, including four different versions of Claude, two versions of Gemini, five versions of ChatGPT and Grok 4. Those models helped train DeepSeek’s capabilities in areas like agentic functioning, question and answer optimization, creative and occupational writing and others.
Another Chinese company, Moonshot AI, allegedly distilled 18 different U.S. models – including Fable 5, Anthropic’s current, most advanced commercially available model – to train its Kimi-K2 and Kimi K3 models. The company used millions of queries meant to extract enhanced capabilities in areas like agentic reasoning, coding and data analysis, computer vision, larger logical frameworks, visual processing and others.
Chinese AI companies manage a sophisticated set of tools and systems that route requests and prompts through multiple pathways to avoid detection.
The advisory lists common tactics observed by Chinese companies, including spreading requests across different accounts, models and platforms, using native APIs, remote cloud providers, and third-party aggregators to obfuscate user metadata, and leveraging proxies and gray tech markets to get around geographic restrictions, terms of use and safeguards built into frontier models.
“Addressing industrial-scale distillation merits a coordinated response across the AI ecosystem, including effective information-sharing, spanning the U.S. Government, private industry, and allied nations,” the advisory stated.
For decades, U.S. national security officials and western business leaders have accused China of leveraging cyberattacks, insider threats and other forms of economic espionage to pilfer proprietary or sensitive technologies from U.S. businesses.
In June, Michael Kratsios, White House head of Office of Science and Technology Policy, made a similar accusation about MoonshotAI of distilling Fable 5 to train its own models, and described a similar “sophisticated” system for evading guardrails and restrictions on usage.
The warning Tuesday levies similar charges about Chinese theft of American tech, but for frontier AI companies that are facing lawsuits themselves from artists, authors, media organizations and other parties who say AI companies illegally trained their models on copyrighted or trademarked work.
Even within the competitive AI industry, companies and open-source organizations commonly share weights and measures for AI systems, or distill other AI systems in the course of legitimate work or research.
The agencies acknowledge this reality, but claim that Chinese companies are engaged in “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale.”
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SonicWall customers are grappling with yet another pair of actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances, a product that’s been besieged with recurring defects and attacks over the past nine months.
The vendor disclosed and released patches for the defects — CVE-2026-83548 and CVE-2026-83549 — and noted both were already actively exploited in the wild in a security advisory Tuesday. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defects to its known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog Wednesday.
SonicWall customers have confronted a barrage of actively exploited vulnerabilities in SonicWall devices for years. Attackers have consistently exploited newly discovered zero-days and years-old defects in the vendor’s products to break into victim environments.
Rapid7 researchers said the new zero-days — a max-severity pre-authentication server-side request forgery vulnerability and a high-severity OS command injection vulnerability — can be chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote-code execution.
SonicWall did not say how many customers have been directly impacted by active exploitation or when the first known instance of exploitation occurred. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
“Please stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Another appliance sitting at the edge of the network, another pair of vulnerabilities chained together, and another unauthenticated path to complete compromise,” Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr, said in an email.
“SonicWall says these vulnerabilities were internally discovered, while also saying it investigated a case indicating active exploitation. Please pick one, or, at minimum, explain how both are true,” Knott added. “Those statements may be technically accurate, but without that context, the disclosure leaves defenders guessing about when and how the vulnerabilities were actually identified.”
The vendor’s security advisory did not include indicators of compromise. It urged customers to contact tech support for assistance in reviewing IOCs and hunting for potential signs of compromise, and if detected, to reimage or redeploy the appliance, change all user and administrator passwords and reset tokens.
SonicWall did not attribute the known exploits to a specific threat group or describe the attacker’s motivations.
The freshly disclosed pair of vulnerabilities are the latest in a series of security issues confronting the vendor’s customers, including actively exploited zero-days, previously disclosed defects, and an attack last year that allowed a state-sponsored threat group to steal the firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer.
In late July, Huntress researchers spotted an attack spree that compromised 30 SonicWall customers in less than two days. Earlier that month, the company acknowledged another pair of zero-days that were exploited for three weeks before the vendor disclosed and patched the defects.
Ransomware groups, including INC ransomware and Akira, have taken a special interest in SonicWall. Ten of the 19 SonicWall defects added to CISA’s KEV catalog since late 2021 are known to be used in ransomware campaigns.
The five defects added to CISA’s KEV most recently, since just mid-December 2025, all impact SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances.
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The agency has released guidance on reducing internet exposure in the wake of the recent Iran-linked hacker attacks.
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The flaws can be exploited for remote code execution, authentication bypass, and device takeover.
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SonicWall customers are attempting to dodge another security challenge as attackers are exploiting a pair of zero-day vulnerabilities that have been confirmed by the vendor.
The company publicly disclosed the vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410 — in a security advisory Tuesday. SonicWall credited an employee with discovering the defects, but it hasn’t said when the discovery occurred or the earliest known instance of exploitation.
Rapid7 researchers told CyberScoop both vulnerabilities were first exploited June 22. “From the cases that our team has observed, the goal is likely ransomware, though we have prevented the actors from achieving exfiltration and encryption,” said Seth Lazarus, senior manager of detection and response services at Rapid7.
Overlapping tactics, techniques and procedures from the attacks observed by Rapid7 indicate the same threat group or attacker discovered and exploited the zero-days, Lazarus added.
SonicWall did not answer questions about the impacts of these attacks thus far, and the company hasn’t attributed the attacks to a known group or described the attacker’s origins and motivations.
The vendor did, however, confirm to CyberScoop that both vulnerabilities have been chained together for exploitation. The vulnerabilities affecting SonicWall SMA1000 appliances, including a max-severity defect that allows attackers to make authenticated requests and a 7.2-rated vulnerability that allows authenticated command injection.
“When these two are chained, an attacker can go from zero access to a complete system compromise for the affected appliance,” said Landon Rice, senior exploit developer at VulnCheck.
Ben Harris, founder and CEO at watchTowr, said two characteristics of the vulnerabilities fuel a sense of dread. “Both were exploited as zero-days before fixes were available, and together they offer a plausible path to remote-code execution from the internet,” he said.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added both zero-days to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Tuesday.
SonicWall encouraged customers to patch the vulnerabilities by upgrading to the latest software version, which it released upon disclosure, and shared some indicators of compromise to help customers hunt for potential malicious activity on their systems.
“Speed of response was a priority for us,” said Bret Fitzgerald, senior director of global communications at SonicWall. “Within days of becoming aware of the issue, our team had developed a script that we can run on behalf of affected customers to assist with resolution, and mitigation efforts are already underway.”
SonicWall and third-party researchers haven’t said how many SonicWall customers are impacted by the exploited vulnerabilities, but the vendor did say it already investigated multiple cases of active exploitation.
Fitzgerald said the company monitors about one million sensors globally and “SMA1000 appliances represent a very small subset of that footprint, less than 5,000 units.”
SonicWall said support staff are also helping customers work through instances of suspicious activity, warning that patching alone is not sufficient.
The vendor and its customers have been hit by a barrage of actively exploited zero-days and previously disclosed defects in SonicWall devices for years. In 2025, an undisclosed state-sponsored threat actor intruded the company’s cloud environment and stole firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer.
Seventeen defects affecting the vendor’s products have been added to CISA’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog since late 2021. Ten of those defects are known to be used in ransomware campaigns, according to CISA, including a wave of about 40 Akira ransomware attacks between mid-July and early August.
“As always,” Harris said, “when something is confirmed as already exploited in the wild, patching is the bare minimum, and breach should be assumed.”
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The Trump administration unveiled its new federal clearinghouse for sharing AI cyber threat information between the government and private sector, and said the project is already receiving threat intelligence on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and prioritizing patching.
Created last month through a White House executive order, “Gold Eagle” will be managed by the Department of the Treasury, with contributions from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Defense, as well as open-source software providers, critical infrastructure operators and industry.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Treasury Department is working hand in hand with the private sector to safeguard our financial institutions, close vulnerabilities, and protect the integrity of the U.S. financial system,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Treasury, along with our partner agencies, will continue to harness frontier AI capabilities to stay ahead of our adversaries and defend the American people from emerging threats.”
Gold Eagle is meant to help both public and private organizations find, fix and patch vulnerabilities found using AI tools before they’re discovered and exploited by bad actors. The work will involve using AI to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities in victim systems and software, and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said it would also further explore ways for the technology to be leveraged for cyber defense.
A senior White House official told reporters on a background call that closed source models from frontier AI models, including Anthropic’s Mythos, will be used to discover vulnerabilities.
White House officials said they worked with the Software Engineering Institute, SEI at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a new platform, the Vulnerability Information and Coordination Environment – or VINTS – to receive third-party reports on AI-discovered vulnerabilities. According to the White House, the system has already begun collecting intelligence on vulnerabilities and prioritizing patches.
“I think on the early side of this, we have seen that the scale of vulnerability discovery, particularly with users of new technology to scan their system, is something that is a step function change [than] we’ve seen seen before,” the official said.
As AI models have improved at carrying out core cybersecurity-related tasks – like scanning code for vulnerabilities or developing proof-of-concept exploit code – cybersecurity experts and policymakers have become increasingly worried. The modern internet is rife with insecure code, misconfigurations and other mistakes that can be identified and exploited faster than ever before using AI tools.
Vulnerabilities in open-source software can be both widespread and hidden, as many commercial software products on the market rely on open-source code but few bother to document it. When hackers compromised a logging tool in the Log4J open-source Apache software library in 2021, it required a massive, multi-month coordination effort by CISA, the private sector and other stakeholders to find and fix affected pieces of software.
The White House official said the work of Gold Eagle is reflective of the administration’s “full support” of U.S. open-source software providers and maintainers.
Open source tools are “vital to systems that run throughout our country and daily life,” a senior administration official said, speaking to reporters on background. “It is being maintained by a talented group of people and entities and we will do everything we can to support the strength of that community.”
Michael Daniel, former White House cyber coordinator under President Barack Obama, told CyberScoop that AI is still so new that policymakers continue to observe its impact and adapt. While some existing communication channels for sharing cybersecurity threat information could probably be duplicated for tracking AI threats, there is still much for policymakers to learn more about the technology, the kind of threats it produces and its ecosystem of stakeholders.
“It may turn out at the end of the day that phishing is still phishing, and the fact that now you’ve got AI tools doing it, it’s still phishing. Or there may be something fundamentally different about it that we need to figure out how to combat and share information around,” he said.
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The Trump administration’s abrupt firing of Election Assistance Commission commissioners last week and a Department of Justice warning threatening states with criminal prosecution have created new legal peril for officials who run, administer and secure elections.
The EAC is an obscure but important agency that oversees testing and standards for voting machines, including around security. While federal certification is voluntary, states have until now relied upon their stamp of approval when purchasing voting machines.
On July 10, Democratic Commissioners Ben Hovland and Thomas Hicks were fired by the White House, while reports indicate that a third Commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, resigned. While Congress mandated the commission be bipartisan, the Supreme Court has recently given the President broad authority to fire executive branch officials at will.
In an interview with NPR, Hovland said he worried the firings would further erode trust that the commission was working in a bipartisan manner.
“And as you eliminate things – or if you get rid of commissioners, for example – or as you eliminate some of these other sort of safeguards or norms, it certainly strains the system,” said Hovland. “And it certainly also likely causes people to lose faith in our democracy and in the process and their confidence in our elections. And that’s very concerning.”
A letter also sent last week to all 50 states by the DOJ said the department will investigate and prosecute any election official “who knowingly retains non-citizens on the state’s voter registration list or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots.”
CyberScoop spoke with several Secretaries of State who said that the number one threat facing elections in their state is not from a foreign country or AI but their own federal government.
Tobias Read, the Democratic Secretary of State for Oregon, told CyberScoop that his office is focused on providing the state’s 36 county clerks with the resources and support they need to carry out a smooth election. But he acknowledged that his office is “playing defense in a lot of ways [from] the intrusion from the federal government” that continues to assert its authority over local elections.
“If the president were actually serious about election security, he would be sending more resources to local election officials and bolstering the system rather than cutting it,” said Read.
This year, several counties in Oregon will offer voters access to a new ballot tracking system that provides text or email updates when a voter’s ballot is moving through mail and has been certified. Reed estimated at “pennies per voter per election” and called it a good option for cash-strapped counties to assure voters their ballots are secure and properly tracked.
At the same time, Read said federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – which once regularly deployed cybersecurity and technical expertise to help states fix vulnerabilities and share threat intelligence – have largely gone quiet.
Oregon ranks in the top ten states for voter participation and relies heavily on mail-in voting. However, state officials like Read lack confidence in the US Postal Service. Though a recent Supreme Court decision blocked an executive order giving the service control over mail-in ballot distribution, officials like Read are urging voters to take other measures to use drop boxes instead as a safer alternative to ensure their vote is counted.
Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Secretary of State and a Democrat running for reelection, said his office is focused on primary elections and processing the mail ballots that have been arriving “for a while.”
After Iranian hackers defaced Arizona’s candidate bio portal last year, Fontes moved to fill a widening gap: the Trump administration’s withdrawal of federal foreign interference training and support. His office is now directly supporting local jurisdictions on election security while coordinating more closely with state law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and other states.
But it’s being done with a fraction of the resources and coordination that the federal government brought to bear under both the Biden and first Trump administrations. While Fontes said he maintains positive personal relationships within the Department of Homeland Security, his office does not have a formal relationship with CISA.
“We’ve hobbled together a loose and often informal network of information sharing – that doesn’t violate any rules, it doesn’t break any laws – but it is certainly not anywhere near as robust as it would be if we had a responsible federal agency that was interested in the security of American elections,” said Fontes.
He said even if CISA offered such services today, he wouldn’t accept it, citing the lack of trust between states and the Trump administration.
“They have proven through their actions that they don’t want to be effective partners in protecting the American electorate and protecting American voters,” said Fontes. “Because of that, the clear answer, the only sensible answer for someone like me, would be to say ‘No, I don’t want the help of people I cannot trust.’ People who have demonstrably and explicitly threatened me and local election administrators of all political stripes with criminal prosecution.”
After this story’s initial publication, CISA acting director Nick Andersen said the agency remains committed working with “with critical infrastructure owners and operators to assist them in securing both the physical security and cybersecurity of the systems and assets that support the nation’s election process.”
“We provide state and local election officials, upon request, no-cost voluntary services such as the sharing of threat information, technical expertise, vulnerability scanning, and resilience-building support,” said Andersen in a statement sent to CyberScoop. “Our regional teams assist partners across the country by assessing risks, helping entities bolster defenses and improve resilience, and responding promptly to threats. We are committed to supporting state and local elections officials to protect election infrastructure and safeguard our democracy.”
Secretaries of State in Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and others have also called the DOJ letters an attempt at federal intimidation of election officials.
Others, like West Virginia Republican Secretary of State Kris Warner, have reiterated their refusal to hand over state voter data. On Monday, a federal judge upheld his right to do so.
Warner wrote to the DOJ in response to say the state was “available to discuss our existing voter registration list maintenance” but “West Virginia law prohibits the disclosure of sensitive personally identifiable information contained in voter registration records.”
It’s leading some states to take new precautions.
Read said he was working with Oregon county officials to make sure “county clerks have the number of their county counsel on speed dial” and know how to distinguish between a legitimate and illegitimate federal warrant or subpoena.
Additionally, FBI raids of election offices around the country to seize ballots records related to the 2020 and 2024 elections have been a cause for Read’s concern. By state law, Oregon and other states must keep copies of the ballot records and other election data they receive from counties for a certain time according to state law, after which they must eventually archive or destroy them according to ballot retention schedules.
Read emphasized that “it’s important to destroy those ballots at the appropriate time,” The Trump administration has used the raids to further the impression of electoral fraud, despite the absence of credible evidence.
“We can see when people are not on top of that, then you expose yourself to other vulnerabilities like the federal government seizing those ballots in Maricopa County [Arizona] and Fulton County [Georgia] as well,” said Read.
A former CISA official estimated that on Election Day in 2024, more than 1,000 representatives from federal, state and local governments, election technology vendors and other election stakeholders sat together in a room to communicate and coordinate.
Less than two years later, Read called his office’s interactions with CISA “minimal.” He recalled that upon taking office as Secretary of State in Jan 2025, one of his first conversations was with one of CISA’s regional advisors. A week later, those advisors were summarily fired by the Trump administration.
UPDATE: 7/14/2026, 11:15 a.m.: Updated with comments from CISA acting director Nick Andersen.
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Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.
On May 18, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a CISA contractor with administrative access to the agency’s code development platform had created a public GitHub profile called “Private-CISA” that included plaintext credentials to dozens of internal CISA systems. Experts who reviewed the exposed secrets said the commit logs for the code repository showed the CISA contractor disabled GitHub’s built-in protection against publishing sensitive credentials in public repos.
CISA acknowledged the leak but has not responded to questions about the duration of the data exposure. However, experts who reviewed the now-defunct Private-CISA archive said it was originally created in November 2025, and that it exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository.
In a written statement, CISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.” But in a May 19 a letter (PDF) to CISA’s Acting Director Nick Andersen, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said the credential leak raises serious questions about how such a security lapse could occur at the very agency charged with helping to prevent cyber breaches.
“This reporting raises serious concerns regarding CISA’s internal policies and procedures at a time of significant cybersecurity threats against U.S. critical infrastructure,” Sen. Hassan wrote.
A May 19 letter from Sen. Margaret Hassan (D-NH) to the acting director of CISA demanded answers to a dozen questions about the breach.
Sen. Hassan noted that the incident occurred against the backdrop of major disruptions internally at CISA, which lost more than a third of it workforce and almost all of its senior leaders after the Trump administration forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, echoed the senator’s concerns.
“We are concerned that this incident reflects a diminished security culture and/or an inability for CISA to adequately manage its contract support,” Thompson wrote in a May 19 letter to the acting CISA chief that was co-signed by Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill), the ranking member of the panel’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. “It’s no secret that our adversaries — like China, Russia, and Iran — seek to gain access to and persistence on federal networks. The files contained in the ‘Private-CISA’ repository provided the information, access, and roadmap to do just that.”
KrebsOnSecurity has learned that more a week after CISA was first notified of the data leak by the security firm GitGuardian, the agency is still working to invalidate and replace many of the exposed keys and secrets.
On May 20, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Dylan Ayrey, the creator of TruffleHog, an open-source tool for discovering private keys and other secrets buried in code hosted at GitHub and other public platforms. Ayrey said CISA still hadn’t invalidated an RSA private key exposed in the Private-CISA repo that granted access to a GitHub app which is owned by the CISA enterprise account and installed on the CISA-IT GitHub organization with full access to all code repositories.
“An attacker with this key can read source code from every repository in the CISA-IT organization, including private repos, register rogue self-hosted runners to hijack CI/CD pipelines and access repository secrets, and modify repository admin settings including branch protection rules, webhooks, and deploy keys,” Ayrey told KrebsOnSecurity. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and it refers to a set of practices used to automate the building, testing and deployment of software.
KrebsOnSecurity notified CISA about Ayrey’s findings on May 20. Ayrey said CISA appears to have invalidated the exposed RSA private key sometime after that notification. But he noted that CISA still hasn’t rotated leaked credentials tied to other critical security technologies that are deployed across the agency’s technology portfolio (KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those technologies publicly for the time being).
CISA responded with a brief written statement in response to questions about Ayrey’s findings, saying “CISA is actively responding and coordinating with the appropriate parties and vendors to ensure any identified leaked credentials are rotated and rendered invalid and will continue to take appropriate steps to protect the security of our systems.”
Ayrey said his company Truffle Security monitors GitHub and a number of other code platforms for exposed keys, and attempts to alert affected accounts to the sensitive data exposure(s). They can do this easily on GitHub because the platform publishes a live feed which includes a record of all commits and changes to public code repositories. But he said cybercriminal actors also monitor these public feeds, and are often quick to pounce on API or SSH keys that get inadvertently published in code commits.
The Private-CISA GitHub repo exposed dozens of plaintext credentials to important CISA GovCloud resources.
In practical terms, it is likely that cybercrime groups or foreign adversaries also noticed the publication of these CISA secrets, the most egregious of which appears to have happened in late April 2026, Ayrey said.
“We monitor that firehose of data for keys, and we have tools to try to figure out whose they are,” he said. “We have evidence attackers monitor that firehose as well. Anyone monitoring GitHub events could be sitting on this information.”
James Wilson, the enterprise technology editor for the Risky Business security podcast, said organizations using GitHub to manage code projects can set top-down policies that prevent employees from disabling GitHub’s protections against publishing secret keys and credentials. But Wilson’s co-host Adam Boileau said it’s not clear that any technology could stop employees from opening their own personal GitHub account and using it to store sensitive and proprietary information.
“Ultimately, this is a thing you can’t solve with a technical control,” Boileau said on this week’s podcast. “This is a human problem where you’ve hired a contractor to do this work and they have decided of their own volition to use GitHub to synchronize content from a work machine to a home machine. I don’t know what technical controls you could put in place given that this is being done presumably outside of anything CISA managed or even had visibility on.”
Update, 3:05 p.m. ET: Added statement from CISA. Corrected a date in the story (Truffle Security said it found the repo gained some of its most sensitive secrets in late April 2026, not 2025).
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