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The most precious asset in today's information age is the secret safeguarded under lock and key. Regrettably, maintaining secrets has become increasingly challenging, as highlighted by the  2023 State of Secrets Sprawl  report, the largest analysis of public GitHub activity.  The report shows a  67% year-over-year increase  in the number of secrets found, with 10 million hard-coded secrets detected in 2022 alone. This alarming surge in secrets sprawl highlights  the need for action  and underscores the importance of secure software development. Secrets sprawl refers to secrets appearing in plaintext in various sources, such as source code, build scripts, infrastructure as code, logs, etc. While secrets like API tokens and private keys securely connect the components of the modern software supply chain, their widespread distribution among developers, machines, applications, and infrastructure systems heightens the likelihood of leaks. Cybersecurity ...

GitHub has announced the general availability of a new security feature called  push protection , which aims to prevent developers from inadvertently leaking keys and other secrets in their code. The Microsoft-owned cloud-based repository hosting platform, which began  testing the feature  a year ago, said it's also extending push protection to all public repositories at no extra cost. The functionality is designed to work hand-in-hand with the existing  secret scanning feature , which scans repositories for known secret formats to prevent their fraudulent use and avert potentially serious consequences. "Push protection prevents secret leaks without compromising the developer experience by scanning for highly identifiable secrets before they are committed," GitHub  said  earlier this week. "When a secret is detected in code, developers are prompted directly in their IDE or command line interface with remediation guidance to ensure that the secret is ...

As SaaS providers race to integrate AI into their product offerings to stay competitive and relevant, a new challenge has emerged in the world of AI: shadow AI.  Shadow AI refers to the unauthorized use of AI tools and copilots at organizations. For example, a developer using ChatGPT to assist with writing code, a salesperson downloading an AI-powered meeting transcription tool, or a customer support person using Agentic AI to automate tasks – without going through the proper channels. When these tools are used without IT or the Security team's knowledge, they often lack sufficient security controls, putting company data at risk. Shadow AI Detection Challenges Because shadow AI tools often embed themselves in approved business applications via AI assistants, copilots, and agents they are even more tricky to discover than traditional shadow IT. While traditional shadow apps can be identified through network monitoring methodologies that scan for unauthorized connections based on...

The supply chain attack targeting 3CX was the result of a prior supply chain compromise associated with a different company, demonstrating a new level of sophistication with North Korean threat actors. Google-owned Mandiant, which is  tracking  the attack event under the moniker  UNC4736 ,  said  the incident marks the first time it has seen a "software supply chain attack lead to another software supply chain attack." The Matryoshka doll-style cascading attack against 3CX first came to light on March 29, 2023, when it  emerged  that Windows and macOS versions of its communication software were trojanized to deliver a C/C++-based data miner named ICONIC Stealer by means of a downloader, SUDDENICON, that used icon files hosted on GitHub to extract the server containing the stealer. "The malicious application next attempts to steal sensitive information from the victim user's web browser," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CI...

The notorious North Korea-aligned state-sponsored actor known as the  Lazarus Group  has been attributed to a new campaign aimed at Linux users. The attacks are part of a persistent and long-running activity tracked under the name  Operation Dream Job , ESET said in a  new report  published today. The findings are crucial, not least because it marks the first publicly documented example of the adversary using Linux malware as part of this social engineering scheme. Operation Dream Job , also known as  DeathNote or NukeSped , refers to multiple attack waves wherein the group leverages fraudulent job offers as a lure to trick unsuspecting targets into downloading malware. It also  exhibits overlaps  with two other Lazarus clusters known as Operation In(ter)ception and Operation North Star. The attack chain discovered by ESET is no different in that it delivers a fake HSBC job offer as a decoy within a ZIP archive file that's then used to launc...

Less than a month ago, Twitter indirectly acknowledged that some of its source code had been leaked on the code-sharing platform GitHub by sending a copyright infringement notice to take down the incriminated repository. The latter is now inaccessible, but according to the media, it was accessible to the public for several months. A user going by the name FreeSpeechEnthousiast committed thousands of documents belonging to the social media platform over several months.  While there is no concrete evidence to support this hypothesis, the timing of the leak and the ironic username used by the perpetrator suggest that the leak was a deliberate act aimed at causing harm to the company. Although it is still too early to measure the impact of this leak on the health of Twitter, this incident should be an opportunity for all software vendors to ask a simple question:  what if this happened to us? Protecting sensitive information in the software industry is becoming increasingly cr...

Cloud-based repository hosting service GitHub said it took the step of replacing its RSA SSH host key used to secure Git operations "out of an abundance of caution" after it was briefly exposed in a public repository. The activity, which was carried out at 05:00 UTC on March 24, 2023, is said to have been undertaken as a measure to prevent any bad actor from impersonating the service or eavesdropping on users' operations over SSH. "This key does not grant access to GitHub's infrastructure or customer data," Mike Hanley, chief security officer and SVP of engineering at GitHub,  said  in a post. "This change only impacts Git operations over SSH using RSA." The move does not impact Web traffic to GitHub.com and Git operations performed via HTTPS. No change is required for ECDSA or Ed25519 users. The Microsoft-owned company said there is no evidence that the exposed SSH private key was exploited by adversaries. It did not disclose how long the se...

GitHub on Monday disclosed that unknown threat actors managed to exfiltrate encrypted code signing certificates pertaining to some versions of GitHub Desktop for Mac and Atom apps. As a result, the company is  taking the step  of revoking the exposed certificates out of abundance of caution. The following versions of GitHub Desktop for Mac have been invalidated: 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, 3.0.5, 3.0.6, 3.0.7, 3.0.8, 3.1.0, 3.1.1, and 3.1.2. Versions 1.63.0 and 1.63.1 of Atom are also expected to stop working as of February 2, 2023, requiring that users downgrade to a  previous version  (1.60.0) of the source code editor. Atom was officially discontinued in December 2022. GitHub Desktop for Windows is not affected. The Microsoft-owned subsidiary said it detected unauthorized access to a set of repositories, including those from deprecated GitHub-owned organizations, used in the planning and development of GitHub Desktop and Atom on December 7, 2022. The repositories ...

New research has found that it is possible for threat actors to abuse a legitimate feature in GitHub Codespaces to deliver malware to victim systems. GitHub Codespaces  is a cloud-based configurable development environment that allows users to debug, maintain, and commit changes to a given codebase from a web browser or via an integration in Visual Studio Code. It also comes with a port forwarding feature that makes it possible to access a web application that's running on a particular port within the codespace directly from the browser on a local machine for testing and debugging purposes. "You can also forward a port manually, label forwarded ports, share forwarded ports with members of your organization, share forwarded ports publicly, and add forwarded ports to the codespace configuration," GitHub  explains  in its documentation. It's  important  to note here that any forwarded port that's made public will also permit any party with knowledge of the UR...

A South Africa-based threat actor known as Automated Libra has been observed employing CAPTCHA bypass techniques to create GitHub accounts in a programmatic fashion as part of a freejacking campaign dubbed PURPLEURCHIN. The group "primarily targets cloud platforms offering limited-time trials of cloud resources in order to perform their crypto mining operations," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers William Gamazo and Nathaniel Quist  said . PURPLEURCHIN first came to light in October 2022 when Sysdig  disclosed  that the adversary created as many as 30 GitHub accounts, 2,000 Heroku accounts, and 900 Buddy accounts to scale its operation. Now according to Unit 42, the cloud threat actor group created three to five GitHub accounts every minute at the height of its activity in November 2022, totally setting up over 130,000 bogus accounts across Heroku, Togglebox, and GitHub. More than 22,000 GitHub accounts are estimated to have been created between September and No...

Okta, a company that provides identity and access management services, disclosed on Wednesday that some of its source code repositories were accessed in an unauthorized manner earlier this month. "There is no impact to any customers, including any HIPAA, FedRAMP, or DoD customers," the company  said  in a public statement. "No action is required by customers." The security event, which was  first reported  by Bleeping Computer, involved unidentified threat actors gaining access to the Okta Workforce Identity Cloud ( WIC ) code repositories hosted on GitHub. The access was subsequently abused to copy the source code. The cloud-based identity management platform noted that it was alerted to the incident by Microsoft-owned GitHub in early December 2022. It also emphasized that the breach did not result in unauthorized access to customer data or the Okta service. Upon discovering the lapse, Okta said it placed temporary restrictions on repository access and that i...

GitHub on Thursday said it is making available its secret scanning service to all public repositories on the code hosting platform for free. "Secret scanning alerts notify you directly about leaked secrets in your code," the company  said , adding it's expected to complete the rollout by the end of January 2023.  Secret scanning is  designed  to examine repositories for access tokens, private keys, credentials, API keys, and other secrets in  over 200 formats  that may have been accidentally committed, and generate alerts to prevent their misuse. The security option was previously limited to repositories owned by organizations that use GitHub Enterprise Cloud and have a GitHub Advanced Security license. For customers of GitHub Advanced Security, the  protections  go a step further by performing the scans for exposed secrets, including custom patterns,  during code pushes . The Microsoft subsidiary also said it's  planning  t...

Security researchers are warning of "a trove of sensitive information" leaking through urlscan.io, a website scanner for suspicious and malicious URLs. "Sensitive URLs to shared documents, password reset pages, team invites, payment invoices and more are publicly listed and searchable," Positive Security co-founder, Fabian Bräunlein,  said  in a report published on November 2, 2022. The Berlin-based cybersecurity firm said it started an investigation in the aftermath of a  notification  sent by GitHub in February 2022 to an unknown number of users about sharing their usernames and private repository names (i.e.,  GitHub Pages URLs ) to urlscan.io for metadata analysis as part of an automated process. Urlscan.io, which has been described as a  sandbox for the web , is  integrated  into several security solutions  via its API . "With the type of integration of this API (for example via a security tool that scans every incoming email ...

File hosting service Dropbox on Tuesday disclosed that it was the victim of a phishing campaign that allowed unidentified threat actors to gain unauthorized access to 130 of its source code repositories on GitHub. "These repositories included our own copies of third-party libraries slightly modified for use by Dropbox, internal prototypes, and some tools and configuration files used by the security team," the company  revealed  in an advisory. The breach resulted in the access of some API keys used by Dropbox developers as well as "a few thousand names and email addresses belonging to Dropbox employees, current and past customers, sales leads, and vendors." It, however, stressed that the repositories did not contain source code related to its core apps or infrastructure. Dropbox, which offers cloud storage, data backup, and document signing services, among others, has over 17.37 million paying users and 700 million registered users as of  August 2022 . The di...

Cloud-based repository hosting service GitHub has addressed a high-severity security flaw that could have been exploited to create malicious repositories and mount supply chain attacks. The RepoJacking technique,  disclosed  by Checkmarx, entails a bypass of a protection mechanism called  popular repository namespace retirement , which aims to prevent developers from pulling unsafe repositories with the same name. The issue was addressed by the Microsoft-owned subsidiary on September 19, 2022 following responsible disclosure. RepoJacking  occurs  when a creator of a repository opts to change the username, potentially enabling a threat actor to claim the old username and publish a rogue repository with the same name in an attempt to trick users into downloading them. While Microsoft's countermeasure "retire[s] the namespace of any open source project that had more than 100 clones in the week leading up to the owner's account being renamed or deleted," Che...

A now-patched security flaw in the vm2 JavaScript sandbox module could be abused by a remote adversary to break out of security barriers and perform arbitrary operations on the underlying machine. "A threat actor can bypass the sandbox protections to gain remote code execution rights on the host running the sandbox," GitHub  said  in an advisory published on September 28, 2022. The issue, tracked as CVE-2022-36067 and codenamed Sandbreak, carries a maximum severity rating of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. It has been addressed in  version 3.9.11  released on August 28, 2022. vm2 is a  popular Node library  that's used to run untrusted code with allowlisted built-in modules. It's also one of the most widely downloaded software, accounting for nearly 3.5 million downloads per week. The  shortcoming  is rooted in the error mechanism in Node.js to escape the sandbox, according to application security firm Oxeye, which  discov...

GitHub has put out an advisory detailing what may be an ongoing phishing campaign targeting its users to steal credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes by impersonating the CircleCI DevOps platform. The Microsoft-owned code hosting service said it learned of the attack on September 16, 2022, adding the campaign impacted "many victim organizations." The fraudulent messages claim to notify users that their CircleCI sessions have expired and that they should log in using GitHub credentials by clicking on a link. Another bogus email  revealed by CircleCI  prompts users to sign in to their GitHub accounts to accept the company's new Terms of Use and Privacy Policy by following the link embedded in the message. Regardless of the lure, doing so redirects the target to a lookalike GitHub login page designed to steal and exfiltrate the entered credentials as well as the Time-based One Time Password (TOTP) codes in real-time to the attacker, effectively allowing ...

DevOps platform GitLab this week issued patches to address a critical security flaw in its software that could lead to arbitrary code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-2884 , the issue is rated 9.9 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and impacts all versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) starting from 11.3.4 before 15.1.5, 15.2 before 15.2.3, and 15.3 before 15.3.1. At its core, the security weakness is a case of authenticated remote code execution that can be triggered via the GitHub import API. GitLab credited  yvvdwf  with discovering and reporting the flaw. A successful exploitation of the critical flaw could enable a malicious actor to run malicious code on the target machine, inject malware and backdoors, and seize complete control of the susceptible devices. While the issue has been resolved in versions 15.3.1, 15.2.3, 15.1.5, users also have the option of securing against the flaw by temporarily disabling...

Cloud-based code hosting platform GitHub has announced that it will now start sending Dependabot alerts for vulnerable GitHub Actions to help developers fix security issues in CI/CD workflows. "When a security vulnerability is reported in an action, our team of security researchers will create an advisory to document the vulnerability, which will trigger an alert to impacted repositories," GitHub's Brittany O'Shea and Kate Catlin  said . GitHub Actions  is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solution that enables users to automate the software build, test, and deployment pipeline. Dependabot  is part of the Microsoft-owned subsidiary's continued efforts to secure the  software supply chain  by  notifying  users that their source code depends on a package with a security vulnerability and helping keep all the dependencies up-to-date. The latest move entails receiving alerts on GitHub Actions and vulnerabilities impacting deve...

GitHub Actions and Azure virtual machines (VMs) are being leveraged for cloud-based cryptocurrency mining, indicating sustained attempts on the part of malicious actors to target cloud resources for illicit purposes. "Attackers can abuse the  runners  or servers provided by GitHub to run an organization's pipelines and automation by maliciously downloading and installing their own cryptocurrency miners to gain profit easily," Trend Micro researcher Magno Logan  said  in a report last week. GitHub Actions ( GHAs ) is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows users to automate the software build, test, and deployment pipeline. Developers can leverage the feature to create workflows that build and test every pull request to a code repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production. Both Linux and Windows runners are hosted on  Standard_DS2_v2  virtual machines on Azure and come with two vCPUs and 7GB of memory. T...