A leaked credential with admin access to the Apache Foundation sat exposed on the internet for years

Security researcher Zane Lackey put the problem plainly: “Recently we found an API key that had been leaked on the internet that had administrative access to the Apache Foundation.” The claim is striking on its own terms. Administrative access to one of the most consequential open-source foundations on the internet is not a minor credential. An attacker holding it would be positioned to affect software that underpins a substantial share of the world’s server infrastructure.

The finding has since been independently corroborated in precise detail. TruffleSecurity published a report documenting how its researchers, scanning deleted PyPI packages, found a GitHub personal access token carrying admin-level access to the Apache Software Foundation’s GitHub organization. That token had been sitting in a deleted package, theoretically out of reach, for two and a half years. The TruffleSecurity write-up is public and links the specific discovery to the broader pattern Lackey described: credentials with extraordinary reach, exposed through channels that most security teams are not actively watching.

The mechanism matters as much as the finding. Deleted PyPI packages are not, in any practical sense, gone. Their contents remain accessible through package index infrastructure long after a maintainer removes them from view. That gap between “deleted” and “unreachable” is where this credential lived for roughly thirty months. It is a reminder that the attack surface for credential exposure extends well beyond live repositories and active codebases into the long tail of artifacts that developers and organizations treat as safely retired.

Recently we found an API key that had been leaked on the internet that had administrative access to the Apache Foundation Zane Lackey

For the Apache Software Foundation specifically, the stakes of such an exposure are worth spelling out. Apache maintains hundreds of projects, including HTTP Server, Kafka, Spark, and Tomcat, software that runs in production environments across finance, healthcare, government, and technology. Administrative access at the organization level on GitHub would, depending on the specific permissions granted, open paths to repository settings, access controls, and potentially the ability to affect code in ways that downstream users would have no reason to question. Supply chain integrity depends heavily on the assumption that the organizations stewarding foundational projects control who can touch them.

What the TruffleSecurity report adds to Lackey’s claim is the forensic specificity that turns an anecdote into a documented case. The two-and-a-half-year exposure window is not an estimate or a rough framing. It is a traceable period during which the token existed in a recoverable artifact while Apache’s organization remained, in principle, accessible to anyone who found it first. Whether anyone did find it first is a question the public record does not settle.

The broader lesson the evidence supports is straightforward: the perimeter that most organizations defend is not the perimeter that matters. Credential hygiene efforts focused on live code, active repositories, and current deployments leave a gap wherever artifacts are published and then abandoned. PyPI is one such surface. It is unlikely to be the only one. Lackey’s finding and TruffleSecurity’s corroboration together make a case that scanning for exposed credentials needs to extend into the deleted and the dormant, not just the active and visible.