26,400 live credentials found scanning 7.25M repos on China's Gitee

A security researcher scanned 7.25 million public repositories on Gitee, China's largest Git hosting platform, and discovered 26,400 live credentials including active organization-admin credentials for a major AI platform and thousands of cloud provider access keys. The research was possible despite Gitee's limited public API by combining multiple data sources including the platform's Explore feed, user pages, and internal search functionality. Unlike GitHub and GitLab, Gitee lacks vendor-partnerships for automated secret scanning, making it vulnerable to widespread credential exposure.