I learned this the hard way due to a script bouncing around an internal gitlab repo for ages with hardcoded AWS keys, and the second someone accidently published it to a public gist, we learned very quickly people that will abuse public AWS keys actually use AWS's recommended regexp ( https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/a-safer-way-to-distrib... ) to find AWS keys, even old ones, though it does result in more noise, which is no doubt why tools like this try to be more specific.