Your Data Is in Places You Never Look
If you use an AI coding agent, it has your API keys. Not because you handed them over — because they're in your environment and your files, and it reads those to do its job. The part nobody expects is that it writes them down.
Originally written September 2026 · Updated
On 22 October 2026, people started calling the previous ten days "Black October." The name came from a viral post, not a vendor or a government. In those ten days there were two unauthenticated remote-code-execution flaws in PHP, a CVSS 10 in GitLab, a poisoned release of the LiteLLM gateway, and breaches at Railway, Zeabur and OpenCode.
The incidents are different. The common thread is not. In the ones that matter here, the thing that left the building was a credential — an environment variable, a provider key, a GitHub token. Patching fixed the software. It did nothing for the keys that had already been read.
That is the loud version. The quiet version is on your laptop, and it starts the same way.