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Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub

You can access data from deleted forks, deleted repositories and even private repositories on GitHub. And it is available forever. This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way.

We surveyed a few (literally 3) commonly-forked public repositories from a large AI company and easily found 40 valid API keys from deleted forks. You create a private, internal version of that repo (via forking) and commit additional code for features that you’re not going to make public. We’ve spent a lot of time documenting how to rotate keys for the most popularly leaked secret types - check our work out here: howtorotate.com.

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