Source Code Exposure
Source-Code Exposure, in the context of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), is the risk that an organization's proprietary software code, configuration files, or embedded secrets are inadvertently or maliciously made public, typically on online platforms like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.
This is a critically high-impact exposure because it directly compromises the organization's intellectual property and its security integrity.
Key Characteristics of the Exposure:
Sensitive Content: The exposure is not just the code itself, but the sensitive data it contains, such as: hard-coded credentials (passwords, API keys, tokens), internal network architecture details, proprietary algorithms, or deployment scripts.
Diverse Sources: The exposure can originate from various organizational entities, making it difficult to control through traditional means:
Company-Sanctioned: An official corporate repository that was mistakenly set to public.
Employee-Created: Code uploaded to a personal developer account by an employee (past or present) who may have forgotten it was public.
Third-Party: Code belonging to a vendor or contractor that contains specific integration details about the client organization.
Adversary Advantage: An attacker uses exposed source code to immediately identify vulnerabilities, reverse-engineer proprietary processes, and gain privileged access to internal systems via the leaked secrets. This transforms an external reconnaissance effort into a successful breach.
CTEM's Role in Managing Source-Code Exposure:
CTEM treats this as an external, validated risk that requires immediate containment because the exposed data is a pre-breach gift to attackers.
Continuous Discovery: The program continuously crawls code-hosting platforms and public forums, actively searching for file names, keywords, and unique code snippets associated with the organization. This ensures that a new leak, whether it's an "Unrelated Company Comment Issue" or a new repository, is found immediately.
Validation and Prioritization: The CTEM process validates that the exposed code is indeed proprietary and then prioritizes the risk based on the type of secret exposed. A repository containing an active database password is a higher priority than one containing an old, inactive configuration file.
Mobilization and Remediation: The immediate response is to revoke the exposed secret (e.g., change the API key) and then initiate the takedown or private setting of the repository. This two-step approach ensures that even if the code remains briefly exposed, the sensitive data it contains is rendered useless to attackers.
ThreatNG is highly effective at mitigating Source-Code Exposure because it focuses its external discovery and specialized intelligence capabilities on the specific platforms where code leaks occur, allowing the organization to take action against exposed secrets and proprietary information instantly.
External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery using no connectors, which is vital for monitoring platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket—the primary sources of source-code exposure. The platform’s continuous monitoring ensures that new or changed repositories are constantly scanned.
The key module here is Code Secret Exposure. This feature specifically focuses on:
Repository and Secret Discovery: Actively searching public code repositories for an organization's name, employee emails, and specific code structures. This helps identify exposures such as "Public Source Code Repository Company Sanctioned" (if a configuration file is publicly exposed) or "Public Source Code Repository Employee Created" (by tracking the employee's corporate email address in commit history).
Online Sharing Exposure: Beyond repositories, ThreatNG monitors for sensitive data placed in public areas of collaborative platforms, which is how it detects a "Public Source Code Repository Unrelated Company Comment Issue," where a developer might have inadvertently posted an API key in a troubleshooting thread.
Intelligence Repositories
The platform’s intelligence is used to provide context and validate the severity of a discovered code leak.
Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): This repository is crucial for validating the exploitability of the leak. If an exposed file contains a password or API key, the intelligence repository helps confirm if that specific secret has been seen in the wild or is tied to other breaches, elevating the exposure risk.
External Assessment and Security Ratings
ThreatNG translates the raw code discovery into a prioritized business risk, enabling rapid remediation of the most dangerous leaks.
Data Leak Susceptibility: This rating will be critically high if the exposed code contains Access Credentials, Security Credentials, or Configuration Files. The assessment prioritizes the findings based on the type of secret. For example, a repository containing a database connection string is a higher priority than one containing non-sensitive build scripts, reflecting the severity of the "Public Source Code Repository Vendor Owned" if it grants access to a critical shared system.
Cyber Risk Exposure: This score reflects the immediate threat posed by exposed code. Suppose the source code reveals a Known Vulnerability in a proprietary application. In that case, this rating emphasizes the urgency of fixing the code and forcing a recompilation, as the attacker now has a complete blueprint of the exploitable flaw.
Investigation Modules and Reporting
ThreatNG provides the tools to quickly move from a repository link to a confirmed, actionable exposure, which is critical for legal and development response.
Advanced Search: When continuous monitoring identifies a large number of potential code artifacts, the analyst uses Advanced Search to filter Code Repository Exposure data by specific keywords (e.g., "API_KEY," "password," or unique proprietary class names). This enables the analyst to quickly pinpoint a "Public Source Code Repository Unrelated 3rd Party" that may only contain a few lines of the organization's code but includes a critical secret.
Reconnaissance Hub: This interface fuses the findings with the risk assessment. The analyst can present a report showing the high Data Leak Susceptibility score, the location of the exposed repository, and the precise file and line number containing the secret, providing the decisive security insight needed to mobilize the development and legal teams.
This process enables efficient Reporting, focused on the immediate risk presented by the exposed secret, rather than just the code volume.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's highly validated findings on source-code exposure are essential for integrating with development and security operations workflows.
When ThreatNG confirms a new Code Secret Exposure (e.g., an exposed AWS key) in a public repository, this critical alert can be automatically sent to a Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform. The SOAR platform can immediately execute a workflow to revoke the exposed key in the cloud environment, notify the developer who created the code, and automatically generate a high-priority ticket in the development team’s Issue Tracking System (like Jira) to remove the hard-coded secret from the source files.
Additionally, the exposure details, including the link to the external repository and the name of the exposed file, can be integrated with the organization’s Static Application Security Testing (SAST) solution. The SAST solution can then be configured to proactively scan the internal, legitimate version of that code base to ensure that the same hard-coded secret hasn't been used elsewhere in the internal repository, preventing future recurrence.
