Can you run this as a pre-receive hook to actually prevent a public commit if it has suspicious patterns in it?

You can use gitleaks to do this now. I added that feature in v3: https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks/releases/tag/v3.0.0

Can you elaborate? What providers?

For example, if someone commits AWS keys to a GitHub repo, GitHub will alert AWS, AWS will revoke your keys and freeze the account until they're satisfied nothing is compromised.

> https://github.blog/2018-10-17-behind-the-scenes-of-github-t...

What??? Even in a private repo?

From the article:

> Since April, we’ve worked with cloud service providers in private beta to scan all changes to public repositories and public Gists for credentials (GitHub doesn’t scan private code).

Private repos are not scanned.

Private repos aren't scanned and if we did offer the service to scan private repos we would only ever contact the repo owners and not the service providers. In the case of public repos we're in a race against time where bad actors are scraping the site and have automation created to use your tokens within seconds of a leak. Private repos scenarios are much simpler to deal with.

the blog says public repos... but good question. Is it only some people that can subscribe to high entropy strings?

Github: I didnt opt-into 2FA: #439658 (3rd party auth required without 2FA)