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Heroku Security Notification

status.heroku.com

31–40 of 123 posts

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#31
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try here: https://github.com/settings/security-log

I used here: /settings/audit-log" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/organizations/ /settings/audit-l... ... but the real question is what would malicious activity look like, exactly?

I see a heap of "downloaded a zip of repository" but I suspect that's Heroku CI or other CI tool running.

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#32
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used here: /settings/audit-log" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/organizations/ /settings/audit-l... ... but the real question is what would malicious activity look like, exactly?

I see a heap of "downloaded a zip of repository" but I suspect that's Heroku CI or other CI tool running.

Yeah I see lots of the same. They seem to correspond with Heroku deploys? Anyone know if that happens when a valid heroku deploy occurs? Do they download a zip?

I've reached out to Heroku support to ask.

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#33

This is a chance to reiterate best practices: Credentials and other secrets, like API keys, should never be hard-coded in the source code repo. Use some sort of secrets management or configuration for that kind of stuff.

In this case, can we confirm that Heroku environment variables were not accessed? Because if they were, even not storing secrets in the source code wouldn’t have prevented a breach.

If Heroku could confirm environment variables were safe I’d have a much better sleep tonight.

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#34
Heroku users using GitHub should start rotating any secrets stored in their repos (people still do), if the OAuth has been compromised it means your repositories could have been cloned. Non-enterprise GitHub users have no detailed audit history to see if their repos were cloned/zipped.

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#35

This is a chance to reiterate best practices: Credentials and other secrets, like API keys, should never be hard-coded in the source code repo. Use some sort of secrets management or configuration for that kind of stuff.

In this case, can we confirm that Heroku environment variables were not accessed? Because if they were, even not storing secrets in the source code wouldn’t have prevented a breach. If Heroku could confirm environment variables were safe I’d have a much better sleep tonight.

The announcement claims that, as far as they know, the attacker can't access your Heroku account, only your GitHub repo (because they only got the GitHub-issued token). So this would imply that your environment variables are safe. That being said, it sounds like they don't yet know how the attacker managed to do what they did, which means they can't rule out the possibility that more data was stolen than is currently known. But it sounds like probably not.

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#36

This is a chance to reiterate best practices: Credentials and other secrets, like API keys, should never be hard-coded in the source code repo. Use some sort of secrets management or configuration for that kind of stuff.

In this case, can we confirm that Heroku environment variables were not accessed? Because if they were, even not storing secrets in the source code wouldn’t have prevented a breach. If Heroku could confirm environment variables were safe I’d have a much better sleep tonight.

>The compromised tokens could provide the threat actor access to customer GitHub repos, but not customer Heroku accounts. With the access to customer OAuth tokens, the threat actor may have read and write access to customer GitHub repositories connected to Heroku.

Based on the above information, my assumption is that the attacker gained access to code repos hosted on GitHub, but not access to live dynos or the Heroku dashboard (that happily shows ENV vars). We'll see if this information updates as the investigation progresses, though.

However, given 1) write access to a github repo, and 2) auto-deployments from github to production dynos (if enabled), an attacker could exfiltrate env vars (among many other nasty things). However, this would trigger events in your app's activity log (new commits + deploys) and should be quick to verify that it didn't happen.

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#37
I just started a Discord server: https://discord.gg/K9ecetqn Please join if you're impacted by this incident, or interested in these topics in general.

I'd like to discuss mitigations around this and similar incidents with other HN:ers:

- Knowledge sharing: resources, how-tos, tips - Discussing prevention, mitigation, etc - Moral support and venting

If there's already such a forum (I assume there is), please send me an invite :)

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#38
This is as good a time as any to ask about Render.

I've been eyeing it recently and I'm thinking about launching my next project with it. Does anyone have any takeaways from using Render vs Heroku?

Re: Heroku Security Notification

#39
To me, this reads like someone got read access to all the source code on Heroku, so if you have any credentials hardcoded in there, now's the time to change them, too.

I wonder if the hackers were kids who got bored around Easter holiday - meaning Heroku's security is shit - or if Heroku deliberately waited to announce this during Easter holiday to minimize the attention it gets - meaning they are as deceitful as all proper megacorps.

I haven't been able to trust their status page to accurately reflect what works and what doesn't for a long time. The only reliable signal is when their status page goes offline ;)

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