Version control software is very popular among web developers. The most used tool might be Git. Unfortunately the repository directory, e.g. .git is often unprotected in production environments. These folders not only contain the source code of a website but also database credentials, API access keys or tokens for popular cloud services like Amazon AWS, salts and hashes. Even more problematic is private data contained in sql dumps or csv files.

Studies e.g. by Internetwache.org or Jamie Brown show that a reasonable amount of websites is affected by this problem. (more…)