Very interesting from a security perspective. So much potentially dangerous code copy-pasted and most of it is probably never updated too. I've personally found some C vulnerabilities in code that I easily found used in many projects by Googling the vulnerable line... Usually not so much to do about it too.

Trying to frame this as a security problem is a stretch, IMO.

My impression is that most public projects on GitHub are only of interest to the author, and maybe a small handful of people. I, for example, have over 100 non-forked public repos and, except for 3 or 4 projects, nobody even looks at most of them, much less clones them and uses them. Even the ~4 that do get attention, it's usually not because they're using the code itself - it's because they're doing something similar and want to see how I did it.

On the other hand, I only have anecdotal evidence to back up that claim, so who knows.