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GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

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Re: GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

#41
post #24

Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but... 3,800 repos? I guess I find it kind of surprising they have that many!

Am I missing the joke here... they have hundreds of millions of repos.

I think they mean that these are internal github-org repos.

The ones used for running the site itself.

Though, its so many that i think there are some customer ones in there too.

Re: GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

#42
post #24

Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but... 3,800 repos? I guess I find it kind of surprising they have that many!

Am I missing the joke here... they have hundreds of millions of repos.

The breach is about internal repositories, not user repositories.

Re: GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

#43
post #24

Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but... 3,800 repos? I guess I find it kind of surprising they have that many!

Am I missing the joke here... they have hundreds of millions of repos.

No, there's no joke, you might have just misread the article (the 3,800 number is the number of internal GitHub repos the employee had downloaded on their personal computer / had access to on their own GitHub account)

Re: GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

#44
The (lack of) security of VSCode has always been astounding. People have asked for sandboxing extensions for years [0] with little to no progress, and issues have been discussed a lot (e.g. [1][2]). I guess it hasn't been a big issue, likely because most developers are not complete idiots. But it only takes one developer and one bad extension to consequences like this.

I mean, I understand that it is hard to sandbox Node.js applications, but apparently Microsoft has put way more effort into their Copilot slop than security.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/52116

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979994

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46855527

Re: GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

#47
post #39
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data has been stolen by a criminal group. Paying for "restoring" the data does not guarantee they will delete all copies. There is no way of proving they actually did and they have in fact very little incentive to actually delete it. You have to take their words for it but how can you trust crooks?

> You have to take their words for it but how can you trust crooks? Because these are repeat actors. If they take a ransom and then re-sell it, no company will pay them ever again. Don't think of experienced criminal enterprises as "groups of irrational scoundrels." They are companies, with employees, who understand game theory.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

#48
post #24

Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but... 3,800 repos? I guess I find it kind of surprising they have that many!

As others have said it's just a fraction. I'm in a medium size tech-related company and we have 7500+ in one Github org. We have two orgs, so altogether easily 10K+. Of course most of it is stale, obsolete, sandbox, personal tools, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if Github would have 100K+ internal repos or even more.

Re: GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

#49

I really hope this pushes Microsoft to add a explicit permission system to VS Code extensions, and improve security of dev containers.

Not holding my breath. This issue has been open since 2018 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/52116

Re: GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

#50
post #28

So which extension? Why don't they tell us?

A few days ago I saw I had an update to the Twig extension. The UI flagged it as having new executable code in the update bundle, so I didn't install the update, disabled the extension as I wasn't working on Drupal views that day, and went about my work. I didn't have time to investigate the new update's contents. When I went back to the extension page, it was taken down: https://open-vsx.org/extension/whatwedo/twig…

I’ve used djlint on a liquid project and it worked well. It supports twig too: https://djlint.com/docs/languages/twig/

They also have an online demo/playground so you can at least give it a shot to see if it works.

I’ve used the twiggy LSP before and there seems to be a few VS code extensions for it: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=moetelo.... and https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Stanisla...

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