- Web3 developer Brian Guan lost $40,000 after accidentally posting his wallet’s secret keys publicly on GitHub, with the funds being drained in just two minutes.
- The crypto community’s reactions were mixed, with some offering support and others mocking Guan’s previous comments about developers using AI tools like ChatGPT for coding.
- This incident highlights ongoing debates about security practices and the role of AI in software development within the crypto community.
I have no sympathy for him, if he is a crypto developer he knows how important those private keys are. And he also knows people scrape public areas all the time looking for keys just like that. The whole point of crypto is to be immutable, so that money is simply lost to him now.
He seems to know how much of a dumb mistake that was, although his description of himself was a bit more colorful.
You’re not wrong about how important those keys are and how he definitely should have known better. But I at least have a little sympathy for the guy. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, even with important stuff. Hopefully they are lucky enough not to lose 40k on one but unfortunately he wasn’t. Whether he should have known better or not, that just plain sucks.
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Did we not learn our lessons from Web 2.0?
Got me good
They made 2 errors.
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Use crypto
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Storing the key anywhere close to the repo.
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It must be automated for it to happen in 2 minutes. Which implies these kind of things happen often enough for someone to write a script for it.
Yes, it absolutely is automated.
There are bots running constantly looking for things that match patterns for exploitable credentials in public commits.
AWS credentials
SSH keys
Crypto wallets
Bank card info
If you push secrets to a public github repo, they will be exploited almost immediately.
The scanning part is definitely automated by many different actors (for the gains or the “lulz”), but being this fast, also automated key usage (account draining) must have been implemented which is a bit more impressive…
Not really. All of the underlying mechanics of crypto are so simple that they can be very easily interacted with by bots. Bots make up the vast majority of all crypto trades; mostly wash trading, but also front-running attacks, scams or outright thefts like this one. There are so many exploitable flaws in crypto that every bug is basically a self-executing bug bounty.
If it was a script I wrote, it would have successfully stolen the $40k, but also stolen my own money and deposit both sets of money into a second intended victims account because I forgot to clear a variable before the main loop runs again.
You always mess up some mundane detail!
It would have deposited the funds in an account “foobar123” and been lost forever
Might have happened in this case too, you never know.
Oh yes absolutely, there are bots constantly crawling any open source code. A friend of mine accidentally leaked their discord API key, nuked a whole server within minutes.
There must be bots trolling GitHub for API keys, crypto secret keys, and other such valuable data
I’m sad I didn’t see any comments saying he shouldn’t be using a $40k wallet key to test his software in the first place. Anything could happen with simple code mistakes…just get an empty wallet or one with a few bucks in it.
If there was any sort of password / highly entropic string detection in their build pipeline it would have caught a wallet’s keys. They aren’t an excuse for lack of diligence, but they should still be in every pipeline where passwords or keys might have to get used.
I’m terrible about building pipelines for most of my personal projects though, so I’m throwing rocks from my glass house here.
I like your CI plan but maybe they just needed some sort of sane policy. Like never commit plaintext keys to any repo. Never work with a $40k key in a new project under development. Never convert a private repo to public.
A CI pipeline wouldn’t fix this since the code would be committed before the pipelines run. This needs to be caught on the dev’s machine with a pre-commit or pre-push hook.
There’s a reason we use .env files and put them in gitignore.
I use a text file version of a novel to back up my keys, then I store the key map in multiple cloud drives. For example, if the word is “lighting” then my key map for that word would be 487,5 (line 487, word 5). Easy to crack, if you know what novel I am using.
That’s the copy protection on dozens of computer games from the 90s.
To get my codes you have to play Alone in the Dark 2, and have the original 2 sided playing cards, then translate that into Brittanic runes and find the latitude and longitude of the given city on a cloth map from the original Ulitma.
Well, I am a Gen-X’r.
Chuck Yeager’s air combat!
What a muppet
Incredibly funny story, incredibly awful website.
