HOW I MADE $64K FROM DELETED FILES — A BUG BOUNTY STORY

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Security researcher Sharon Brizinov earned $64,000 by discovering secrets in deleted GitHub repository files. His research highlighted how Git retains copies of all files in its commit history, even after they are deleted from the working directory. Completely removing sensitive files requires specific tools, such as git filter-branch or git-filter-repo, as Git maintains references in its object storage for several weeks before performing garbage collection.