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Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

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Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#271

Post by ktm5j »

fishywang wrote: post #106
bibinou wrote: post #97

Hi Yogi, I'm guessing your Github account has been hijacked. Support won't respond to your emails because it could be the attacker impersonating you, or he could still have access to your email and get info that way. This is Standard Operating Procedure I've seen applied on stolen accounts in MMO videogames involving stolen credit cards and organized crime. Sometimes wait time was 6 months with no contact, because th…

If GitHub really has reason to suspect that op's account is hijacked, they should be able to figure out at least one of op's email address (simply by the fact that email address is attached to the account long before the hijacking happened), and send some communications there? Or provide an official process of "we suspended your account because we have reason to suspect that your account is hijacked. we won't respons…

A malicious party could have access to OP's other accounts, maybe OP reuses passwords. It's in the realm of plausibility that they are being cautious not to alert the attacker. If they/authorities want to use the opportunity to observe and collect evidence then I think these actions on GitHub's part are somewhat reasonable, albeit kind of shitty.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#274

Post by thephyber »

jacquesm wrote: post #243
thephyber wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "other side" is completely relevant. We don't yet know if this is a policy issue, a tech issue, a legal issue, a national security issue, an account takeover / hacking, etc.

It doesn't matter because clearly support has failed. There is no way a thing like a prominent github account like this one should be suspended without immediate communication with the user, which did not happen. The fact that this ends up on HN at all is the problem.

> should be suspended without immediate communication with the user

I don't think we have enough information to definitively prove that his email address is still accurate on the account. If the account was taken over by a malicious user (hopefully not because they claim MFA was enabled), then the new user's email address may be the one that was notified.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#275

Post by njsubedi »

thephyber wrote: post #212
njsubedi wrote: post #194

Whoa! I was talking about the horror stories of losing GitHub account in a several of my latest comments/threads and I get to see another one. Why wouldn't they send out a notice, at least, before deactivating an old, active account?

> Why wouldn't they send out a notice If it was an account takeover, the malicious user would have changed the email address on account.

They could send out a notice to old email when they see a recent email change. When people change their email address in a service, that doesn't mean the old, verified email is completely useless.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#276

Post by onetom »

Many commenters were so focused on offerring some git repo hosting alternatives, while it was clearly stated in the post that @yg's main use-case was PR review.

What would you recommend to replace that feature?

https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ doesn't say much about PRs/Issues unfortunately, but I found this GH-issue which suggest the Gitea do have a review system since 2018 autumn, which seems to be on par with Github's interface: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3748

Can anyone confirm this, who used both Github and Gitea PR review features?

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#277

Post by gitgud »

blocked_again wrote: post #33
the_svd_doctor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an easy way to do that ? Some script available somewhere ?

You can write a simple GitHub action that pushes your repo to GitLab/BitBucket etc every 30 minutes or something.

Probably better to have the action run on every push to master, no point running it every 30 mins if it hasn't been updated in months...

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#279

Post by notdang »

YooLi wrote: post #209

I had my username (three letters, my initials) taken and replaced with initials + underscore + number (xxx_123). No comment from GH or even alert they were changing it. I guess someone with friends at GH decided they wanted it. What can you do...

that's almost what the author did here, they found an "unused" github handle that they liked: "yg" and wrote to support to claim it. No need to have friends at GH.

https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1...

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