Home Depot GitHub token exposed for a year, granted access to internal systems

by kernelrockson 12/12/2025, 6:23 PMwith 162 comments

by AdmiralAsshaton 12/12/2025, 9:56 PM

>When reached by TechCrunch on December 5, Home Depot spokesperson George Lane acknowledged receipt of our email but did not respond to follow-up emails asking for comment. The exposed token is no longer online, and the researcher said the token’s access was revoked soon after our outreach.

>

>We also asked Lane if Home Depot has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if anyone else used the token during the months it was left online to access any of Home Depot’s internal systems. We did not hear back.

As soon as they realized that the researcher had contacted "the media", they probably escalated internally to their legal team before anyone else, who told them to shut up.

The response, if one ever comes, will be a communication dense in lawyer-speak that admits no fault whatsoever.

by dnwon 12/13/2025, 2:40 AM

Last week I accidentally exposed my OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini keys. They somehow ended up in Claude Code logs(!) Within seconds I got an email from Anthropic and they have already disabled my keys. Neither OpenAI nor Google alerted me in anyway. I was able to login to OpenAI and delete all the keys quickly.

Took me a good 10-15 minutes to _just_ _find_ where Gemini/AI Studio/Vortex projects keys _might_ be! I had to "import project" before I could find where the key is. Google knew key was exposed but the key seemed to be still active with a "!" next to it!

With a lot of vibe coding happening, key hygiene becomes crucial on both issuer and user ends.

by lillecarlon 12/12/2025, 10:45 PM

I've accidentally pushed a personal PAT(ro) to both Github and gist because of poor hygiene in personal projects, both times Github dropped the PAT and notified me.

by tclancyon 12/12/2025, 8:40 PM

Man, a year to grab all the Home Depot 2x4s you want! Someone could have built a sphere with those.

by throwaway81523on 12/14/2025, 6:43 AM

Damn, their web site is so awful. If the code for it is all in github and the token got loose, maybe the right attacker could have cleaned up the slow javascript bloat, made the search system a lot better, fixed the login bug that makes logging in fail more than half the time depending on your browser, streamlined the ordering system, etc. We missed our chance!

by dbancajason 12/13/2025, 2:26 AM

What's the biggest damage someone could have done with that info?

by ProAmon 12/13/2025, 3:56 AM

If there has been one thing proven over the past 5 years is that the Home Depot IT department is useless and cant be trusted with anything regarding security.

by deadbabeon 12/12/2025, 11:11 PM

Wow, someone could have used the data from internal systems to do some serious insider trading

by 8cvor6j844qw_d6on 12/13/2025, 4:05 AM

Any suggestions for secrets management to distribute API keys/DB secrets/etc.?

For a self-hosted use case.

Currently, manually SSH into VPs and updating env files but not sure if its best practice.

by htrpon 12/12/2025, 11:41 PM

it's easy to scan for publicly known services, really difficult to understand if a random string that says key somewhere is actually a random internal api key

by jgbuddyon 12/12/2025, 8:02 PM

"Open Source Home Depot" has a nice ring to it

by rao-von 12/12/2025, 8:15 PM

I’m surprised that GitHub, OpenAI etc. doesn’t have automation to scan the usual surfaces for hashes of their access tokens.

It seems like a cheap and simple thing to offer your customers a little extra safety.

Anybody interested in starting a platform agnostic service to do this?

by VTimofeenkoon 12/12/2025, 7:11 PM

Given the absolute state of their website on mobile it's hardly surprising. It's faster to find an employee and ask them where an item is at instead of waiting for the search to finish, see that it the "current store" now points to a random location somewhere in a different state, pick the correct store and re-do the search

by indigodaddyon 12/12/2025, 7:01 PM

Wow, the non-response/communication at any time by Home Depot to all parties involved in trying to help them, is staggering.

by gregjwon 12/12/2025, 11:56 PM

jesus christ

by Computer0on 12/12/2025, 10:07 PM

[flagged]