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An unpatched security issue in the Travis CI API has left tens of thousands of developers' user tokens exposed to potential attacks, effectively allowing threat actors to breach cloud infrastructures, make unauthorized code changes, and initiate supply chain attacks. "More than 770 million logs of free tier users are available, from which you can easily extract tokens, secrets, and other credentials associated with popular cloud service providers such as GitHub, AWS, and Docker Hub," researchers from cloud security firm Aqua  said  in a Monday report. Travis CI is a  continuous integration  service used to build and test software projects hosted on cloud repository platforms such as GitHub and Bitbucket. The issue, previously reported in 2015 and  2019 , is rooted in the fact that the  API  permits access to historical logs in cleartext format, enabling a malicious party to even "fetch the logs that were previously unavailable via the API." The l...

Cloud-based repository hosting service GitHub on Friday shared additional details into the theft of its integration OAuth tokens last month, noting that the attacker was able to access internal NPM data and its customer information. "Using stolen OAuth user tokens originating from two third-party integrators, Heroku and Travis CI, the attacker was able to escalate access to NPM infrastructure," Greg Ose said , adding the attacker then managed to obtain a number of files - A database backup of skimdb.npmjs.com consisting of data as of April 7, 2021, including an archive of user information from 2015 and all private NPM package manifests and package metadata. The archive contained NPM usernames, password hashes, and email addresses for roughly 100,000 users. A set of CSV files encompassing an archive of all names and version numbers of published versions of all NPM private packages as of April 10, 2022, and  A "small subset" of private packages from two organiz...

Salesforce-owned subsidiary Heroku on Thursday acknowledged that the theft of GitHub integration OAuth tokens further involved unauthorized access to an internal customer database. The company, in an  updated notification , revealed that a compromised token was abused to breach the database and "exfiltrate the hashed and salted passwords for customers' user accounts." As a consequence, Salesforce said it's resetting all Heroku user passwords and ensuring that potentially affected credentials are refreshed. It also emphasized that internal Heroku credentials were rotated and extra detections have been put in place. The attack campaign, which GitHub  discovered  on April 12, related to an unidentified actor leveraging stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis-CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The timeline of events as shared by the cloud platform is as follows - April 7, 2022  - Threa...

Cloud-based code hosting platform GitHub described the recent  attack campaign  involving the abuse of OAuth access tokens issued to Heroku and Travis CI as "highly targeted" in nature. "This pattern of behavior suggests the attacker was only listing organizations in order to identify accounts to selectively target for listing and downloading private repositories," GitHub's Mike Hanley  said  in an updated post. The  security incident , which it discovered on April 12, related to an unidentified attacker leveraging stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The Microsoft-owned company said last week that it's in the process of sending a final set of notifications to GitHub customers who had either the Heroku or Travis CI OAuth app integrations authorized in their accounts. According to a detailed step-by-step analysis carried out by GitHub, th...

A Chinese state-sponsored espionage group known as Override Panda has resurfaced in recent weeks with a new phishing attack with the goal of stealing sensitive information. "The Chinese APT used a spear-phishing email to deliver a beacon of a Red Team framework known as 'Viper,'" Cluster25  said  in a report published last week. "The target of this attack is currently unknown but with high probability, given the previous history of the attack perpetrated by the group, it might be a government institution from a South Asian country." Override Panda, also called  Naikon , Hellsing, and Bronze Geneva, is known to operate on behalf of Chinese interests since at least 2005 to conduct intelligence-gathering operations targeting  ASEAN countries . Attack chains unleashed by the threat actor have involved the use of decoy documents attached to spear-phishing emails that are designed to entice the intended victims to open and compromise themselves with malware...

GitHub on Monday noted that it had notified all victims of an attack campaign, which involved an unauthorized party downloading private repository contents by taking advantage of third-party OAuth user tokens maintained by Heroku and Travis CI. "Customers should also continue to monitor Heroku and Travis CI for updates on their own investigations into the affected OAuth applications," the company  said  in an updated post. The  incident  originally came to light on April 12 when GitHub uncovered signs that a malicious actor had leveraged the stolen OAuth user tokens issued to Heroku and Travis CI to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The Microsoft-owned platform also said that it will alert customers promptly should the ongoing investigation identify additional victims. Furthermore, it cautioned that the adversary may also be digging into the repositories for secrets that could be used in other attacks. Heroku, which has pulled supp...

Cloud-based repository hosting service GitHub on Friday revealed that it discovered evidence of an unnamed adversary capitalizing on stolen OAuth user tokens to unauthorizedly download private data from several organizations. "An attacker abused stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM," GitHub's Mike Hanley  disclosed  in a report. OAuth access tokens are often  used  by apps and services to authorize access to specific parts of a user's data and communicate with each other without having to share the actual credentials. It's one of the most common methods used to pass authorization from a single sign-on ( SSO ) service to another application. As of April 15, 2022, the list of affected OAuth applications is as follows - Heroku Dashboard (ID: 145909) Heroku Dashboard (ID: 628778) Heroku Dashboard – Preview (ID: 313468) Heroku Dashboard – Classi...

Code hosting platform GitHub has  revoked  weak SSH authentication keys that were generated via the GitKraken git GUI client due to a vulnerability in a third-party library that increased the likelihood of duplicated SSH keys. As an added precautionary measure, the Microsoft-owned company also said it's building safeguards to prevent vulnerable versions of GitKraken from adding newly generated weak keys. The problematic dependency, called " keypair ," is an open-source SSH key generation library that allows users to create RSA keys for authentication-related purposes. It has been found to impact  GitKraken  versions 7.6.x, 7.7.x, and 8.0.0, released between May 12, 2021, and September 27, 2021. The flaw — tracked as CVE-2021-41117 (CVSS score: 8.7) — concerns a bug in the pseudo-random number generator used by the library, resulting in the creation of a weaker form of public SSH keys, which, owing to their low entropy — i.e., the measure of r...

Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare last month fixed a critical vulnerability in its CDNJS library that's  used by 12.7% of all websites  on the internet. CDNJS is a free and open-source content delivery network (CDN) that serves about  4,041 JavaScript and CSS libraries , making it the  second most popular  CDN for JavaScript after Google Hosted Libraries. The weakness concerned an issue in the CDNJS library update server that could potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands, leading to a complete compromise. The vulnerability was discovered and reported by security researcher RyotaK on April 6, 2021. There is no evidence of in-the-wild attacks abusing this flaw. Specifically, the vulnerability works by publishing packages to Cloudflare's CDNJS using GitHub and npm, using it to trigger a  path traversal vulnerability , and ultimately trick the server into executing arbitrary code, thus achieving remote code exe...

GitHub on Tuesday launched a technical preview of a new AI-powered  pair programming  tool that aims to help software developers write better code across a variety of programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go. Copilot , as the code synthesizer is called, has been developed in collaboration with  OpenAI , and leverages Codex, a new AI system that's trained on publicly available source code and natural language with the goal of translating comments and code written by a user into auto-generated code snippets. "GitHub Copilot draws context from the code you're working on, suggesting whole lines or entire functions," GitHub CEO Nat Friedman  said  in a blog post. "It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the internet." Despite its function as an AI-based autocomplete for writing boilerplate code, the Micr...

Code-hosting platform GitHub Friday officially announced a series of updates to the  site's policies  that delve into how the company deals with malware and exploit code uploaded to its service. "We explicitly permit dual-use security technologies and content related to research into vulnerabilities, malware, and exploits," the Microsoft-owned company  said . "We understand that many security research projects on GitHub are dual-use and broadly beneficial to the security community. We assume positive intention and use of these projects to promote and drive improvements across the ecosystem." Stating that it will not allow the use of GitHub in direct support of unlawful attacks or malware campaigns that cause technical harm, the company said it may take steps to disrupt ongoing attacks that leverage the platform as an exploit or a malware content delivery network (CDN). To that end, users are refrained from uploading, posting, hosting, or transmitting any co...

Lodash, a popular npm library used by more than 4 million projects on GitHub alone, is affected by a high severity security vulnerability that could allow attackers to compromise the security of affected services using the library and their respective user base. Lodash is a JavaScript library that contains tools to simplify programming with strings, numbers, arrays, functions, and objects, helping programmers write and maintain their JavaScript code more efficiently. Liran Tal, a developer advocate at open-source security platform Snyk, recently published details and proof-of-concept exploit of a high-severity prototype pollution security vulnerability that affects all versions of lodash, including the latest version 4.17.11. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-10744 , potentially affects a large number of frontend projects due to the popularity of lodash that is being downloaded at a rate of more than 80 million times per month. Prototype pollution is a vulnerability t...

An unknown hacker yesterday successfully managed to hack into the official GitHub account of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux project and created 11 new empty repositories . It appears that the cyberattack was, fortunately, just a "loud" defacement attempt rather than a "silent" sophisticated supply-chain attack that could have been abused to distribute modified malicious versions of the open-source Canonical software. In a statement, David from Canonical confirmed that attacker(s) used a Canonical owned GitHub account whose credentials were compromised to unauthorizedly access Canonical's Github account. "We can confirm that on 2019-07-06 there was a Canonical owned account on GitHub whose credentials were compromised and used to create repositories and issues among other activities," David said. "Canonical has removed the compromised account from the Canonical organization in GitHub and is still investigating the extent o...

Developers around the world depend on open source components to build their software products. According to industry estimates, open source components account for 60-80% of the code base in modern applications. Collaboration on open source projects throughout the community produces stronger code, squashing the bugs and catching the vulnerabilities that impact the security of organizations who look to open source components as the key to their application building success. Thanks in part to the "thousand eyeballs" of the community, the number of reported vulnerabilities in open source projects is on the rise, spiking 51% in 2017 from the previous year. This is even more concerning since, as shown in the same study, most vulnerabilities are found in popular projects. Data shows that 32% of the top 100 open source projects have at least one vulnerability, meaning that developers have their work cut out for them, no matter which components they are using in their products....

What just happened would definitely gonna surprise you. Linus Torvalds—father of the Linux open-source operating system—finally admitted his behavior towards other developers in the Linux community was hurting people and Linux. In a surprising move this weekend, Torvalds apologized for insulting and abusing other developers for almost three decades and took a break from the open-source software to work on his behavior. In an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) on Sunday, Torvalds said that he was confronted by people of the Linux community this week about his lifetime of not understanding emotions, and apologized for his personal behavior that has hurt people and possibly has driven some of them away from working in kernel development altogether. Torvalds wrote, "I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely." "I am going to take ...

Maintainers of the Gentoo Linux distribution have now revealed the impact and "root cause" of the attack that saw unknown hackers taking control of its GitHub account last week and modifying the content of its repositories and pages. The hackers not only managed to change the content in compromised repositories but also locked out Gentoo developers from their GitHub organisation. As a result of the incident, the developers were unable to use GitHub for five days. What Went Wrong? Gentoo developers have revealed that the attackers were able to gain administrative privileges for its Github account, after guessing the account password. The organisation could have been saved if it was using a two-factor authentication, which requires an additional passcode besides the password in order to gain access to the account. "The attacker gained access to a password of an organization administrator. Evidence collected suggests a password scheme where disclosure on on...

Downloaded anything from Gentoo's GitHub account yesterday? Consider those files compromised and dump them now—as an unknown group of hackers or an individual managed to gain access to the GitHub account of the Gentoo Linux distribution on Thursday and replaced the original source code with a malicious one. Gentoo is a free open source Linux or FreeBSD-based distribution built using the Portage package management system that makes it more flexible, easier to maintain, and portable compared to other operating systems. In a security alert released on its website yesterday, developers of the Gentoo Linux distribution warned users not to use code from its GitHub account, as some "unknown individuals" had gained its control on 28 June at 20:20 UTC and "modified the content of repositories as well as pages there." According to Gentoo developer Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera, after gaining control of the Gentoo Github organization, the attackers "repla...

Here's the biggest news of the week—Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. For those unaware, GitHub is a popular code repository hosting service that allows developers to host their projects, documentation, and code in the cloud using the popular Git source management system, invented in 2005 by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. GitHub is used by many developers and big tech companies including Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and IBM to store their corporate code and privately collaborate on software, but Microsoft is one of the top contributors to the web-hosting service. Microsoft has uploaded several of its most important projects, including PowerShell , the .NET framework, and the Microsoft Edge JavaScript engine , to the website under open source licenses. Microsoft also partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 . Citing sources familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that GitHub opted to sell to Microsoft in part because it was impr...

The National Security Agency (NSA) — the United States intelligence agency which is known for its secrecy and working in the dark — has finally joined GitHub and launched an official GitHub page. The NSA employs genius-level coders and brightest mathematicians, who continually work to break codes, gather intelligence on everyone, and develop hacking tools like EternalBlu e that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers in April and abused by the WannaCry ransomware last month to wreak havoc worldwide. The intelligence agency mostly works in secret, but after Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, the NSA has started (slowly) opening itself to the world. It joined Twitter in the same year after Snowden leaks and now opened a Github account. GitHub is an online service designed for sharing code amongst programmers and open source community, and so far, the NSA is sharing 32 different projects as part of the NSA Technology Transfer Program ( TTP ), while some of these are 'coming soon.' ...

Microsoft has announced to shut down CodePlex -- its website for hosting repositories of open-source software projects -- on December 15, 2017. Launched in 2006, CodePlex was one of the Microsoft's biggest steps towards the world of open source community -- where any programmer, anywhere can share the code for their software or download and tweak the code to their liking. However, Microsoft says that the service has dramatically fallen in usage and that fewer than 350 projects seeing a source code commit over the last 30 days, pointing to GitHub as the "de-facto place for open source sharing." GitHub – 'Facebook for Programmers' In a blog post published Friday, Microsoft Corporate VP Brian Harry wrote that the shutdown of CodePlex is because the open source community has almost entirely moved over to GitHub, which provides similar functionality for sharing code that people can collaborate on. "Over the years, we have seen a lot of amazing opti...