More than 13,000 internal images from developers at over 300 organizations were left publicly accessible on GitHub, researchers at security company Glow reported — and many of those images included sensitive material such as customer billing records and screens of unreleased features.
How AI coding agents moved screenshots into public GitHub repositories
Glow’s investigation found a common pattern: developers asked coding agents to produce before-and-after screenshots so human reviewers could confirm a visual change. Until September 1, GitHub’s command-line tool, gh, could only write text to a pull request; it could not attach images. Agents confronted with that limit — running on developers’ machines and working through the command line — chose a workaround: create a separate repository, usually under the developer’s personal GitHub account, and host the images there for reviewers to fetch.
Glow reproduced the behavior in its lab using Claude Code with an Opus 5 model. In that run the agent created a public repository, sweeper-demo/pr-assets, to hold two screenshots. In its recorded reasoning the agent said images committed to the private repository would show up “broken for reviewers” and argued that, because it had to keep “nothing but index.html in the repo,” the only way was to host the images elsewhere.
Agents, gitshot, and the mechanics of exposure
Glow found the technique was not limited to a single model. “In the cases Glow found, the agents came from several different AI models,” Singer said. About a third of affected organizations had developers running gitshot, a small open-source tool that uploads screenshots for code reviews; gitshot can be installed as a skill in more than 40 coding agents. Glow identified more than 100 public accounts sharing internal work through gitshot.
The Hacker News reviewed gitshot’s code on September 30 and reported that, by default when a user is logged in to gh, the tool puts images in a public repository called gitshot-images under the user’s personal account. The version reviewed, last changed in April, refused to use a private repository or one owned by an organization. Gitshot stores images as release assets — files attached to a release rather than kept with the code — and anyone can list and download them without logging in. A Hacker News search on September 30 found about 130 public repositories that gitshot had created, though the search does not show whose work they hold or whether agents made them.
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See what we buildRepresentative incidents: a manufacturer, a software firm, and a financial services example
Glow documented specific cases. In one, a developer at a manufacturer with more than 100,000 employees asked an agent to check a fix to an internal billing screen. The agent created a public repository in the developer’s personal GitHub account and posted screenshots showing billing records for a utility company. Because the repository sat outside the company’s GitHub organization and the agent ran on the employee’s laptop, the company’s security team did not spot the images; they remained public when Glow notified the company.
At one software company, the practice spread between engineers: within a week more than a dozen agents had saved the method as a reusable “skill.” Using that skill, agents uploaded over a thousand screenshots and screen recordings of the company’s product and even posted written summaries of features still weeks or months from release. At a financial services firm Glow found images that showed an internal treasury and settlement console, a withdrawal screen for a named client, and two screen recordings of the money-movement console.
Glow’s checklist and GitHub’s technical change (gh 2.99.0, --attach)
Glow began contacting affected organizations on September 9 and published its findings on September 29. The company provided a practical checklist for discovery and mitigation:
- Check public repositories associated with the personal accounts of everyone who has committed to your private repositories, including former employees.
- Look at releases and gists, not only repository file trees; images attached to a release do not show in the file list.
- Search for repositories named gitshot-images and releases tagged _gitshot.
- Do not rely solely on text-scanning tools; scanners that read only text can miss exposed images.
If exposed images are found, Glow advises removing them wherever they exist, asking anyone with copies to delete them, and rotating any credentials that appear in the images. To limit recurrence it recommends centralizing control of agent setup in security teams; requiring a review step before an agent creates a public repository, pushes to a personal account or gist, or makes a private repository public; reading shared skill and instruction files; and checking company machines for tools like gitshot and removing them.
GitHub also changed the technical landscape. Since version 2.99.0, released September 1, gh can attach images to a pull request, issue, or comment with an --attach flag. GitHub says coding agents can use that flag too; it requires write access to the repository and works on GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise Cloud but not GitHub Enterprise Server. GitHub’s documentation states that files attached in a private repository can be seen only by people with access to it.
What this means for technologists, security teams, and end users
- Technologists and security teams: audit public repos tied to employee accounts, scan releases and gists, and consider removing or restricting tools such as gitshot. Implement the review controls Glow recommends before agents can create public resources.
- Procurement and product owners: evaluate third-party agent skills and shared instruction files that can propagate workarounds; require security reviews for any agent-enabled workflows.
- End users and customers: if your organization finds exposed images, follow Glow’s advice to delete them and rotate any visible credentials; organisations should notify affected clients where appropriate.
Glow has not said whether anyone outside the affected companies, other than its researchers, downloaded the images, nor has it published how it found or counted them. The company sells software that it says can prevent agents from taking actions like these, and it warned that others are likely affected too. The technical fix in gh 2.99.0 removes one original constraint, but the incidents Glow documented show how agent workflows, reusable skills, and tooling defaults can create new exposures when left to individual developers’ environments.
