Security News
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.
According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, the threat actors use a new CAPTCHA solving system, follow a more aggressive use of CPU resources for mining, and mixe 'freejacking' with the "Play and Run" technique to abuse free cloud resources. Whereas Sysdig identified 3,200 malicious accounts belonging to 'PurpleUrchin,' Unit 42 now reports that the threat actor has created and used over 130,000 accounts on the platforms since August 2019, when the first signs of its activities can be traced.
Slack suffered a security incident over the holidays affecting some of its private GitHub code repositories. BleepingComputer has come across a security incident notice issued by Slack on December 31st, 2022.
Intruders copied source code belonging to Okta after breaching the identity management company's GitHub repositories. Okta was alerted by Microsoft-owned GitHub earlier this month of "Suspicious access" to its code repositories and determined that miscreants copied code associated with the company's Workforce Identity Cloud, an enterprise-facing access and identity management tool to enable workers and partners to work from anywhere.
Currently GitHub partners with service providers to flag leaked credentials on all public repos through its secret scanning partner program. Figure A. GitHub launched the secret scanning for public repositories as a beta this month.
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. The security event, which was first reported by Bleeping Computer, involved unidentified threat actors gaining access to the Okta Workforce Identity Cloud code repositories hosted on GitHub.
Okta, a leading provider of authentication services and Identity and Access Management solutions, says that its private GitHub source code repositories were hacked this month. According to a 'confidential' email notification sent by Okta and seen by BleepingComputer, the security incident involves threat actors stealing Okta's source code.
Okta, a leading provider of authentication services and Identity and Access Management solutions, says that its private GitHub source code repositories were hacked this month. According to a 'confidential' email notification sent by Okta and seen by BleepingComputer, the security incident involves threat actors stealing Okta's source code.
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.
GitHub will require all users who contribute code on the platform to enable two-factor authentication as an additional protection measure on their accounts by the end of 2023. Imposing 2FA as a mandatory measure for all GitHub accounts will make the platform a safer space where users can feel more confident about the quality of the code they download from repositories.