AI Pentest Bot Found Admin GitHub Token at $13B Startup Baseten in 25 Minutes

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An autonomous penetration testing agent called Strix discovered a live GitHub admin token belonging to ML infrastructure firm Baseten during a pre-vendor security evaluation. The bot found a publicly accessible Harbor container registry on Baseten's domain, pulled a Docker image, and scanned its build history using TruffleHog. A GitHub personal access token had been embedded in a RUN instruction during a March 2023 image build and was never rotated, leaving it exposed in plaintext for over three years. The token granted full admin and push access to core product repositories and read/write access to private customer code, with no human involvement beyond the initial prompt. The root cause was a non-expiring, repo-scoped GitHub token on a bot account, compounded by a long-known Docker ARG secret-handling mistake that bakes credentials permanently into image build history.

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