People's private keys are public on GitHub Do not push private keys or passwords to public repos on GitHub

[Ogyn]

I'm writing this as a cautionary tale to anyone pushing to GitHub, or any other similar service. Be careful what you make public.

GitHub made a patch relatively recently where they made this harder to do, so I feel better about sharing info on this.

You can search on GitHub or something like Grep code patterns for private keys of crypto wallets, and the insane thing is, I know people who made (stole) a lot of money doing this. To me, this is unethical, but that's the world we live in.

So please, be careful what you make public, or that 20 ETH you've got can disappear

 

[NpBS]

Pardon me for my ignorance, but how can your private keys become public? Is it user error?

 

[Ogyn]

Pardon me for my ignorance, but how can your private keys become public? Is it user error?

Click to shrink...

Yes. To simplify, the public key is your username and the private key is your password. Unfortunately, plenty of people expose their private keys. In this example, they write some code to do something crpyto-related, and then publish the code with the private key being used publicly.

 

[NpBS]

oooh so some people

Yes. To simplify, the public key is your username and the private key is your password. Unfortunately, plenty of people expose their private keys. In this example, they write some code to do something crpyto-related, and then publish the code with the private key being used publicly.

Click to shrink...

basically forget to remove their private key from the code they wrote when publishing it to Github? that's actually unfortunate as hell

 

[Ogyn]

oooh so some people


basically forget to remove their private key from the code they wrote when publishing it to Github? that's actually unfortunate as hell

Click to shrink...

Forget to remove it or keep the repo public instead of making it private. Either way, you shouldn't develop with the private key of a wallet you're actually storing value in.

 

[NpBS]

Yeah that's true and is pretty much common sense. Hopefully some of them realize their mistake and act as soon as possible