That one stumped me. Why not just encrypt with a hardcoded public key, then only the attacker can get the creds.
The simple B64 encoding didn't hide these creds from anyone, so every vendor out there's security team can collect them (e.g. thinking big clouds, GitHub, etc) and disable them.
If you did a simple encryption pass, no one but you would know what was stolen, or could abuse/sell it. My best guess is that calling node encryption libs might trigger code scanners, or EDRs, or maybe they just didn't care.
