New York Times warns freelancers of GitHub repo data breach
New York Times warns freelancers of GitHub repo data breach
The New York Times notified an undisclosed number of contributors that some of their sensitive personal information was stolen and leaked after its GitHub repositories were breached in January 2024.
- The New York Times suffered a breach of its GitHub repositories in January 2024, leading to the theft and leak of sensitive personal information of freelancers.
- Attackers accessed the repos using exposed credentials, but the breach did not impact the newspaper's internal systems or operations.
- The stolen data, amounting to 273GB, was leaked on 4chan and included various personal details of contributors as well as information related to assignments and source code, including the viral Wordle game.
GitHub sucks with private repositories anyways. If any company needs a sizable source control utility, just hosting their own GitLab instance will be way cheaper and safer than entrusting it to Microsoft and paying an unnecessary enterprise rate to GitHub.
Hot take: GitLab is sluggish, buggy, crap. It is the "Mega Blocks" of source control management.
If you have source files that are more than a few hundred lines and you try to load them on the web interface, forget about it.
They can't even implement 2FA in such a way that it isn't a huge pain to interact with. There's been an open issue for over 7 years now to implement 2FA like it is everywhere else, where you can be signed in to more than one device at a time if you have 2FA enabled (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/16656).
Not to mention this was not a GitHub failure, this was a failure by the NYTimes to secure their developer's credentials. This "just in house/self host everything and magically get security" mentality that's so prevalent on Lemmy is also just wrong. Self hosting is not a security thing, especially when you're as large of a target as NYTimes. That one little misconfiguration in your self hosted GitLab instance ... the critical patch that's still sitting in your queue ... that might be the difference between a breach like this and protecting your data.
GitLab sucks and has been getting worse. Their system requirements are high because they can’t figure out how to make efficient code.
I’ve since signed up but haven’t used GitHub, so I can’t claim if it’s better or worse. But I’m definitely looking for an alternative
I've been pretty happy with Gitea for small projects. I had to learn how to use it for because a client was already using it and wanted to upgrade to a more recent version. I was brought in just to make sure that it would work without introducing disaster, and that was my introduction to it. It's nearly completely brainless to run as a docker container and it seems to work just fine.
Efficiency is not even my top concern with their code: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/0-click-gitlab-hijacking-flaw-under-active-exploit-with-thousands-still-unpatched/
I mean if they’re really looking for security, you don’t have to trust GitHub to host it, you can use GitHub Enterprise Server to self host your own GitHub.
Hella expensive like you say, but, if you’re set on GitHub and the enterprise support they provide, there are options.
Didn’t read the article – but why are they mentioning “freelancers” specifically? Is there some kind of feature on GitHub to better promote yourself as a freelancer?
Freelancers who did work for the NYT, e.g. photographers.
Ah – I misinterpreted the title – thanks.
I assume since the freelancers are affected by the hack they were informed by the Times.