Why are there lots of unique clones of my Github repo when there is nothing interesting to see?

user_12352006 0
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I created a repository last week with content for my website. It's a fork of quite known template. There is nothing interesting for anyone to see as of now, let alone to clone this repo. Nevertheless, there are already 12 unique cloners of the repo, as shown in Traffic section. Whats even more sus is that there is only one unique visitor to my repo (that's me from my second account), so none of the cloners even visited the repo, they just cloned it. Who are they? My hypothesis is:

  1. Someone backuping the internet, like archive.org (which shown no results when querying my repo's url)
  2. Malicious bots looking for leftover passwords or private keys
  3. Some error on the side of me or github

edit: This question might be related, but i feel like the cause might be different and I hope they would have already fixed the wrong script.

git-clone github security git
1 Answers

GitHub provides a public events API where users can see almost every event that's happened publicly. This means that as soon as you create a repository and push data to it, anyone can notice that fact without ever looking at the page for your repository.

Without knowing who's cloning it, it's hard to say why it was cloned, but it could be people looking for credentials, researchers interested in popular languages or software development practices, or a wide variety of other things. Even GitHub probably doesn't know the answer, because all the information they would have on the cloners in such a case is the IP address and, if the user was authenticated, the username. As long as the repository is public and the level of usage is not excessive, this isn't something they'd think is intrinsically concerning and wouldn't inquire more deeply into.

I, too, wish I had some magical way to find this information out, because it is a curious phenomenon, but I'm not sure it's possible to know.

user_87054320
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