Why Deleting Sensitive Information from Github Doesn't Save You

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So you accidentally committed a password or API key to Github. Ouch.

“No problem!”, you think, “I’ll just follow Github’s helpful information on how to delete sensitive information and I’ll be fine!”

Just today, I saw a great article detailing one developer’s experience with committing sensitive information to Github. Unfortunately, this article missed the main point. In this post, I’m going to show exactly how hackers instantly harvest information committed to public Github repositories, and why deleting this information doesn’t solve the problem.

Github on Jordan Wright

Why Deleting Sensitive Information from Github Doesn't Save You