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Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen

bleepingcomputer.com

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Re: Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen

#21

Not sure if anyone knows but if you use AWS, you can actually create your own repository there for your organization. it doesn’t have the GitHub UI or features like issues, but should going in the right direction where your organization owns your private repos.

Having your repo in Amazon's cloud instead of Microsoft's cloud doesn't mean that you "own" it to a greater degree, does it? It's just a different company holding the keys for you.

Re: Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen

#22
post #7

> This evening, a hacker going by the name Shiny Hunters contacted BleepingComputer to tell us they had hacked into the Microsoft GitHub account, gaining full access to the software giant's 'Private' repositories. Well, someone asked the other day whether or not private repositories on GitHub were safe: [0] I think you now have a concrete answer regardless if this is true or not. I have already made the case to priva…

> I think you now have a concrete answer regardless if this is true or not.

How do we have a concrete answer if this is not true?

Re: Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen

#23
post #10
post #7

> This evening, a hacker going by the name Shiny Hunters contacted BleepingComputer to tell us they had hacked into the Microsoft GitHub account, gaining full access to the software giant's 'Private' repositories. Well, someone asked the other day whether or not private repositories on GitHub were safe: [0] I think you now have a concrete answer regardless if this is true or not. I have already made the case to priva…

Isn't the upside of hosted platforms like this that they have teams of people securing and monitoring the platform, which can be a bit much for one person who's self-hosting? I do self-host other things but the article doesn't say anything about how the breach might've occurred (e.g. 2FA not enabled?).

That's the SaaS sales mantra repeated. It may or may not be true no matter how appealing the argument is.

Ultimately, your weakest point ends up being humans who are prone to mistakes. You can mitigate some of those mistakes with technology but you can't mitigate all of them. So SaaS may help shore up certain attack vectors but it may increase focus on the remaining vectors and may potentially make failure points more significant (more impact for a security breach from a large provider vs less impact of a security breach from systems of independent providers). Some of that can be mitigated with smart designs, but you lose some advantage of traditional "security through obscurity" which has some value (though it shouldn't be relied on as a failsafe).

Re: Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen

#24
post #12

> In a directory listing and samples of other private repositories sent to BleepingComputer, the stolen data appears to be mostly code samples, test projects, an eBook, and other generic items. Other than private keys or sensitive info being left behind, doesn't appear to be severe. Looks nothing burger given the data until more is released. > Microsoft employee Sam Smith replied to Under the Breach's tweet stating t…

> Curious, what does microsoft use internally? Instance of github enterprise? Azure devops? I guess they have internal Git servers, since they develop VFS for Git[1] to handle large amount of files in git, but IIRC github isn't support it yet [1] https://vfsforgit.org/

Yes. Most teams are using git repos in Azure DevOps. Anything in GitHub is supposed to be made public pretty quickly.

Re: Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen

#25
> Overall, from what was shared, there does not appear to be anything significant for Microsoft to worry about, such as Windows or Office source code.

> In a directory listing and samples of other private repositories sent to BleepingComputer, the stolen data appears to be mostly code samples, test projects, an eBook, and other generic items.

Re: Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen

#26

Not sure if anyone knows but if you use AWS, you can actually create your own repository there for your organization. it doesn’t have the GitHub UI or features like issues, but should going in the right direction where your organization owns your private repos.

Having your repo in Amazon's cloud instead of Microsoft's cloud doesn't mean that you "own" it to a greater degree, does it? It's just a different company holding the keys for you.

True. It's just a lot safer because of how AWS has their permissions/access/ACL setup. Not to mention the attack surface is less since you don't expose your repo organization name, repo users, etc like they have it out in open in GitHub.

Re: Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen

#29
post #7

> This evening, a hacker going by the name Shiny Hunters contacted BleepingComputer to tell us they had hacked into the Microsoft GitHub account, gaining full access to the software giant's 'Private' repositories. Well, someone asked the other day whether or not private repositories on GitHub were safe: [0] I think you now have a concrete answer regardless if this is true or not. I have already made the case to priva…

Private github repositories are private the same way that facebok messages are private - private from your roommate, not from the people who own the platform or determined attackers.
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