So there’s this project I made called pearlOS. Great project, you should really check it out, but that’s not the point of the story. One day a few months ago I wake up to see that someone forked pearlOS. Strange, ‘cause it only has 6 stars and is relatively unpopular. Who made this fork? @Passw, of course! This guy is an interesting character for sure. When I click on his profile I see that his activity is private for some reason. When I see his repos I immediately understand why.

2.7k repos and all of them are forked

To understand why he has 2.7k repos and why all of them are forked, I immediately began scrolling trough all of his repos. There are thousands of repos, all named like this: (NAME_OF_CREATOR)-(REPO_NAME). Huh, that’s strange. Then I see that one of my other repos have been cloned by this passw guy: Kite. An even more obscure choice since I’m the only one that even knows of it. This is strange so I commence in googling shit about this guy and I can’t find anything. I get tired of this so I just continue coding instead of learning about this guy.

1 month later everything got worse

I decided – 1 month later – to check out @passw’s fork of my repo… And it was updated? I was genuinely baffled so in the end I got tired and just blocked him, citing “edgelord that clones people’s repos” as the reason.

Today

And that brings us to today. Where I made the choice of revisiting this whole history by doing more research. And that’s when I realized. Bots. Of course! That makes all of this pointless but I atleast realized what happened. @passw is probably a bot that clones people’s repos in search of exposed information such as API keys etc.

And that brings us to the end of this post. Sorry for not posting in a while, I’ve been busy with doing actual code and not doing anything code related but I’m back in the loop again. So byeee :3