this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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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