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.
  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    555·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
      432·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        5 months ago

        I will never use GitLab after seeing CVE-2023-7028. It should simply not have been possible with any reasonable security posture. I do not want their software running on my machines.

        • PlexSheep@infosec.pubEnglish
          3·
          5 months ago

          I self host Forgejo for a pretty long time now. I put my personal stuff there and if something seems like the public might like it I mirror it to GitHub and Codeberg. Forgejo is amazing and will be even more amazing when federation support gets stable.

    • hddsx@lemmy.caEnglish
      211·
      5 months ago

      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

      • numbermess@fedia.io
        13·
        5 months ago

        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.

          • realbadatEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            For one thing, more FOSS focused. It’s lighter/faster for me than a self hosted gitlab, there is nothing hidden behind a paywall, they are working on some nice activitypub integration, actions are really handy (yes it’s a bit of yaml soup), codeberg is using and supporting it, a better focus on security and stability than gitea (where it forked from), the ux is clean, and that’s about what I can think of off the top of my head.

            • hddsx@lemmy.caEnglish
              2·
              5 months ago

              I’m down with all of those but possibly activitypub integration. Does that add to the product or is it a deviation from the core product?

              • realbadatEnglish
                2·
                5 months ago

                Imo, an add.

                Creating a bug report or feature request can be done without having to create an account, and the backend tools (including blocking instances) are being completed first.

                It’s not like it’s forced either. You can just run it local and have no federation (once the feature is out of course, right now you wouldn’t have it regardless).

    • subtext@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      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.

  • etchinghillside@reddthat.comEnglish
    7·
    5 months ago

    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?