5 Million Apps Scanned, And The Secrets Are Still Harder to Find Than Your Missing Brain Cells
So some bright spark decided to scan five million JavaScript applications—yes, five fucking million—just to confirm what any competent operator already knows: developers can’t keep a secret to save their lives, their jobs, or their company’s entire goddamn infrastructure. The study found over 200,000 unique secrets hardcoded into this digital septic tank we call the npm ecosystem. That’s 200,000 keys, tokens, and credentials just begging to be harvested by the first script kiddie with a regex and a dream.
Now, the report tries to soften the blow by saying “only” 5% of applications contain secrets. ONLY FIVE PERCENT. Let me put that in perspective for the mathematically challenged: that’s 250,000 applications. A quarter of a million ticking time bombs, each one ready to hand over database credentials, API keys, and God knows what else to anyone who can right-click and hit “View Source.” And here’s the beautiful part—0.3% had more than TEN secrets embedded. Those aren’t developers, those are fucking performance artists specializing in career suicide.
The researchers tried to be charitable, suggesting many of these are “npm packages” not production apps. Oh, well that’s all right then! It’s only foundational code that gets sucked into every fucking project on the planet like a dependency black hole. And my personal favorite excuse? “But they’re test credentials!” Sure they are, champ. And I’m positive those test credentials that follow EXACTLY the same pattern as your production keys won’t help anyone brute-force their way into your live systems. Christ on a bike.
GitHub’s secret scanning? Useless. It’s like using a pool noodle to dam a river of stupidity. By the time it catches something, your secret’s already been cloned, forked, and is living its best life on a pastebin in Russia. The problem isn’t the tooling—it’s the meat-based ID10T errors who think “I’ll just put this key here for now and remove it later” is a viable strategy. Spoiler: you won’t. You’ll commit it, push it, deploy it, then act shocked when your AWS bill looks like the national debt of a small country.
Had a developer last week who swore blind his keys were “just for testing.” Right. Testing what? The structural integrity of our firewall? I rotated his credentials, locked his account, and routed all production error logs straight to his phone at 3 AM. He doesn’t hardcode secrets anymore. Or code much at all, really. Turns out his new job asking “Would you like fries with that?” doesn’t require API keys. Funny how that works.
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