Why their greatest secret licks appear behind the firewall: private vs. public repos

Secret management is still one of the most difficult aspects of modern application security. While many security teams focus on monitoring public repositors, and for a good reason, the real danger often lurks in places that they could consider safe. This misunderstanding can lead to significant weaknesses in a company's development ecosystem.

The numbers from the Gitguardian State of Secrets Spread 2025 Report Tell a convincing story that could surprise you. While public repositories certainly represent risks, whereby 23.7 million new secrets were discovered there only in 2024, our investigations show that more than a third of private repositors, 35%, contain at least one plain text, compared with only 4.6% of public repository. This means that internal code repository secrets exposed about eight times more often than the code was pressed publicly.

This indicates a world in which developers assume that private reposes are naturally safer. The data clearly show that this assumption is dangerously incorrect. As soon as an attacker gets a foot, all of this plain -text registration information gets access to exactly what he wishes: your resources and your data.

Secrets that are waiting to be exploited

The term “privately” creates a false feeling of security that often leads to complacency. Many developers and DevOps experts believe that private reposes are invisible to attackers, but this ignores several attack vectors. Phishing campaigns for developers, endangered employee registration information and insider threats can offer malicious actors direct access to their private source code.

Private repositories often serve as a backbone of a company's development infrastructure. The contributions come from various teams, including support engineers, DevOps specialists, contractors and third-party providers. Many of these participants lack a formal safe coding training and increases the likelihood of registration information.

Focus on the leaked code and overlooked violation code

Public repositorys tend to benefit from a ramp light. Developers understand that everything that has been pushed on public repositories is permanently sought -after and visible to the world. Of course, this knowledge promotes better safety hygiene. Conversely, private repository can feel protected from this test and create an environment in which developers may take abbreviations or implement quick and layered solutions such as hard -coding registration information.

The types of secrets that can be found in private repositories further illustrate this problem. Our research results show that AWS -iam key appears five times more often in private repositories than in public. Secrets that we recognize with our generic detectors, such as passwords that are usually missing the characteristic predetermined patterns, which you can easily identify with simple pattern -matching, are three times more common in private repositories. For example, ODBC strings look like:

Extended Properties="Driver=SQL Server;uid= MyName;pwd= MySuper$ecretP4ssword"

This makes it very difficult to write the necessary regular expression in order to take all variations into account.

Plain text login information is not just a security problem

This secret spread creates significant challenges that go beyond the security risk. It creates development teams a form of work; A kind of workflow tax. If secrets are discovered late in the development life cycle, perhaps months after the merger into the code base, organizations are exposed to expensive rework. The teams have to create hotfix branches, carry out emergency registration information and carry out time-consuming incidents that disrupt normal development activities.

If security scans are only operated in production environments, developers receive notifications about problems in code that they wrote weeks ago or months ago. This separation between the writing code code code and the reception of security feedback creates a bad feeling for developers who are constantly asked to deliver features faster. Developers can be desensitized for security warnings and consider them more of a annoying interruption than as valuable instructions.

Many organizations tighten these problems by implementing different scan tools for different environments. You could use a scanner for public github repositories, another for local Gitlab instances and another for Azure Devops. This tool forces engineers to juggle several dashboards and learn different systems instead of concentrating on improving the safety of the application itself.

The attempt to bring developers with security tools on board is difficult enough. Bringing the use of project -specific security tools is a non -starter. We need a uniform path to tackle this problem on a scale.

Give developers to accelerate them to accelerate them

At Gitguardian we have followed a Pro-Developer approach by integrating security directly into the developer workflow. We believe that an effective secret detection must occur when developers actually work and when they make decisions about their code. This philosophy leads all of our product features.

Our Pre-Commit hook with Ggshield And VSCode expansion Give developers immediate feedback so that you can fix secrets before ever reaching the repository. This eliminates after -work cycles and creates security awareness at the moment of creation. By taking problems at this point, we prevent secrets from entering the code base primarily, which is always more efficient than it later removed.

Cut the lacquers in the jointly used code at an early stage

For code that makes it a released repository, you can implement our pull request and fusion requirements scan functions. As with Github Check runs. This means that secrets can block the merger such as failed tests in order to increase the idea that the security is part of the “definition of finished” for any code change. This integration helps the teams to build a culture, in which security is more of a natural part of the development process than a subsequent thoughts.

As a check before use ours, ours CI/CD pipeline scans through Ggshield Catch all secrets that may have run through earlier stadiums. These integrations can be created automatically if secrets are recognized without requiring custom-term script or complex configuration. This multi -layered approach ensures that secrets have several ways to catch before production.

When organizations implement Gitguardian for the first time, it automatically carries out a complete historical scan in all commits and branches in a repository to get a basis for you. This retrospective analysis often reveals many more hidden secrets than the teams expect in their private repositors. Even more important for our customers, we usually see a steady decline in the new secrets over time, since engineers internalize better security practices and develop new habits.

Find all secrets beyond the code

For many security teams, the security of Secrets only affects the Code repositors. This is part of the reason why there is so much focus on the management of corporate secrets as part of the solution. While the introduction of these vaults is an important step towards the safety of the mature secrets, there are unfortunately many other places where secrets can expire. Every tool that your team touches while it goes through the code, delivery and debugging process.

According to our investigation from the spreading report of 2025 Secrets, 38% of the secrets found in the collaboration in tools were classified as critical or urgently, compared to 31% in the source code. And alarming only 7% of the secrets between the code base and these supportive collaboration platforms overlap. These are mostly completely separate exposure.

Communication platforms such as slack and teams as well as project management tools such as Jira and ServiceNow are often used to survive the necessary login information for a project, even if the secret is properly arched. Some teams even use internal wikis to “secure” secrets.

Concentrate on real leaks, not on false alarms

By concentrating on implementable knowledge rather than overwhelming developers with double warnings, we reduce the alarm fatigue and certainly keep the teams. When a login is going through, our audit trail shows exactly where it appeared for the first time, who committed it and which repositories still refer to. This detailed information shortens the response time from days to minutes and enables security teams to react quickly and effectively.

Solve

If your secret scanning strategy has only concentrated on the public visibility of a leak, you ignore the greater risks for violations, and we would be happy to help you address this problem. Private repositories are more frequent login information and often contain higher secrets, and these leaks typically occur without checking the public repository. In addition to the code, these secrets, even if they are stored properly, are copied far too often into other systems into plain text.

Gitguardian can meet your scanning requirements in the entire developer workflow from the IDE to the CI/CD pipeline and the container registers. We can help you to transform the secret detection from an occasional loud audit into a continuous quality gate.

We want developers to send code faster because they avoid security -relevant rework. We want SRES to sleep better at night if you know that the login information is not exposed. Safety teams finally close the gap between scan production environments and the achievement of extensive security over the entire development life cycle.

It is time to pay attention to leaks in their private repositors and other platforms around the code. In this way, you can transform the secret spread of an overwhelming challenge into a manageable topic and protect the sensitive references of your organization, regardless of where you could possibly hide in plain language.

*** This is a safety blogger -Syndicated -Blog from Gitguardian Blog -take control of your Secrets Security, which was written by Dwayne McDaniel. Read the original post at: