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One Click Leaked 1,122 Passwords to GitHub

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D3mola

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One click leaked 1,122 passwords onto public GitHub.

Claude Code’s “Don’t ask again” button is a shortcut most coders trust. Security firm Apiiro found that shortcut saved real passwords and API keys into a settings file that ended up on public GitHub — 1,122 files holding real secrets, out of 104,185 public copies Apiiro searched.

Hook: One click leaked 1,122 passwords onto public GitHub.

Context: When Claude Code asks before running a command, picking “Yes, and don’t ask again” saves the exact command, secret included, as an allow rule in .claude/settings.local.json inside the project folder. The file is meant to stay on your machine, but nothing in the repo marks it private, so it can be committed to public GitHub.

Stakes: Apiiro searched 104,185 public copies of the file and found real secrets in 1,122 of them — 2,539 secrets in 1,994 repos across 63 organizations. The haul included a database vendor’s admin cloud key, a production Azure Postgres password, a Square production token, and a medical-records database password. Gitleaks and TruffleHog both missed 215 of the 1,122 files.

Payoff: One button meant to save time opened the door. Check your own repos for .claude/settings.local.json and rotate any password it holds. Send this to the one person who codes with AI.

Watch next: AI agents failed all 135 open research questions from US national labs — what that says about trusting agents with real work.

How we verified this: Apiiro’s report (published Nov 5, 2026, by Shmulik Cohen and Matan Giladi) was cross-checked against three independent summaries of the same research, all agreeing on the 1,122 / 104,185 / 2,539 / 63-organization counts and the leaked examples. Apiiro did not test the credentials, so “real secret” means a key in a known format or a password next to a public host — only one key was confirmed live by its owner. As of Nov 8, Anthropic has not replied publicly.

If the file is already tracked in a repo, Apiiro’s fix is to remove it from version control and add it to the repo’s own .gitignore:

git rm --cached .claude/settings.local.json

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