GitGuardian: 28.65 Million New Hardcoded Secrets Exposed in Public GitHub Commits in 2025
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GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 report published March 27 reveals 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets (API keys, tokens, passwords) committed to public GitHub repos in 2025, continuing a multi-year rise. With 36 million new developers joining GitHub over the year and AI coding tools generating more code faster, the credential exposure surface is accelerating. This is the security debt side of the agentic coding explosion — every AI agent that commits code is a potential secrets leak vector.