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Matrix.org hacked

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Re: Matrix.org hacked

#11
post #2

For a bit of context: Matrix.org infrastructure has been hacked a second time in 24h, after restoring everything they went down again, story developing here: https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1116304867683905537

The hacker is now doing a post-mortem in the GitHub issues of the project: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues

Re: Matrix.org hacked

#12
post #5

I believe this is meant to show that it is a targeted attack on the project lead: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Arathorn Unfortunately I don't have any background context for possible reasons why "actual transparency" on the top line is the issue chosen by the attacker, but makes it seem ideologically driven.

I don't think that this is a targeted attack.

Seems more like a way of showing "I got access to 5493973 passwords and to show that, instead of picking some random users, I'll pick the one responsible for the shoddy security".

Re: Matrix.org hacked

#17
post #12
post #5

I believe this is meant to show that it is a targeted attack on the project lead: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Arathorn Unfortunately I don't have any background context for possible reasons why "actual transparency" on the top line is the issue chosen by the attacker, but makes it seem ideologically driven.

I don't think that this is a targeted attack. Seems more like a way of showing "I got access to 5493973 passwords and to show that, instead of picking some random users, I'll pick the one responsible for the shoddy security".

Or it might be a clear, concise way of showing that he has access to the entire file without disclosing the information of random users, which also happens to be a particularly short command.

Re: Matrix.org hacked

#18
post #9
post #6

Doesn't surprise me that much, Matrix doesn't seem to be too concerned with security, more with security theatre (considering you can still not easily disable read receipts in your client, a major privacy leak IMO, among other issues).

Disabling read receipts is a client feature. Yes, the currently most mature client doesn't have that feature, but nothing in Matrix precludes it.

There is plenty of other issues with matrix and the reference clients on top of something as simple as mandatory leaking of your presence in a chatroom. I've run a matrix homeserver for almost 3 weeks and it as an utter pain to maintain, despite not a single version upgrade and I was plagued with issues that no chat platform would have if the protocol was remotely sane.

edit: That is on top of the numerous security issues this hack uncovered. Apparently the matrix.org devs kept a users.txt file with a dump of users + passwords on the server. Signing keys for debian packages were stored unencrypted on the production server. People used unsafe SSH settings (SSH Agent Forwarding), ran outdated servers with known root-priv RCEs for months and root privileges for all users on a server. Why should I ever trust a matrix developer with their protocol or reference implementations ever again if they can't be trusted with the simple task of updating a service when a critical CVE comes out?

Re: Matrix.org hacked

#20

As na linux/unix sysadmin with 15+ years of experience my eyes are bleeding everytime I see cat | grep instead of just grep ;D

Reason why you would do that (and I often do) is that you have further piping options so it becomes standard work flow and muscle memory.

What I usually do is cat the file to inspect it, hit Control+C, then up arrow for previous command, then further pipe and head/tail/grep the file.

Starting a grep command is fine if you know that's all you're going to be doing.

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