Incident Report: Inadvertent Private Repository Disclosure

In retrospect of course it's always easy to criticise, but still, the diff is really cringeworthy.

The deleted code is very specific-looking. Nobody writes that just casually or out of ignorance. Also it is what was at use in production.

It's very naive to just go and replace that with nice-looking, shorter code.

Key lessons:

- Understand what you are deleting

- Treat production code as sacred

- Add reasonably extensive comments for delicate code (as the original one). Git commit messages aren't enough.

- Try out infrastructure changes in production-like staging servers. I really doubt they properly did, as they say the "majority" of 17M requests failed.

Normally perhaps not, but if you host other people's IP . The risk of a leak like this can have major economic consequences to other organisations which trusted you with security for their code.

To me it looks like poor design , I would expect private repos to be hosted completely independently and in isolation with more secure and throughly audited code with longer release cycle (LTS ?) after the code has been well tested in the public free repos.

It is not excessive if you consider the potential value of the private repos that github has control over. They already do something similar for enterprise edition. It leaves bad taste that smaller customers are not treated with similar caution