Security News

GitHub revealed today that an attacker stole the login details of roughly 100,000 npm accounts during a mid-April security breach with the help of stolen OAuth app tokens issued to Heroku and Travis-CI. The threat actor successfully breached and exfiltrated data from private repositories belonging to dozens of organizations. Approximately 100k npm usernames, password hashes, and email addresses from a 2015 archive of user information.

GitHub has revealed it stored a "Number of plaintext user credentials for the npm registry" in internal logs following the integration of the JavaScript package registry into GitHub's logging systems. The code shack went on to assure users that the relevant log files had not been leaked in any data breach; that it had improved the log cleanup; and that it removed the logs in question "Prior to the attack on npm."

Today, GitHub has launched a new public beta to notably improve the two-factor authentication experience for all npm user accounts. Myles Borins, Open Source Product Manager at GitHub, said that the code hosting platform now allows npm accounts to register "Multiple second factors, such as security keys, biometric devices, and authentication applications."

Salesforce-owned subsidiary Heroku on Thursday acknowledged that the theft of GitHub integration OAuth tokens further involved unauthorized access to an internal customer database. As a consequence, Salesforce said it's resetting all Heroku user passwords and ensuring that potentially affected credentials are refreshed.

GitHub has announced that it will require two factor authentication for users who contribute code on its service. "The software supply chain starts with the developer," wrote GitHub chief security officer Mike Hanley on the company blog.

GitHub announced today that all users who contribute code on its platform will be required to enable two-factor authentication on their accounts by the end of 2023. Active contributors who will have to enable 2FA include but are not limited to GitHub users who commit code, use Actions, open or merge pull requests, or publish packages.

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.

Early in April 2022, news broke that various users of Microsoft's GitHub platform had suffered unauthorised access to their private source code. GitHub, if you've never used it, is a cloud-based source code control system, best known for hosting the public repositories of many open source software projects.

GitHub revealed details tied to last week's incident where hackers, using stolen OAuth tokens, downloaded data from private repositories. "We do not believe the attacker obtained these tokens via a compromise of GitHub or its systems because the tokens in question are not stored by GitHub in their original, usable formats," said Mike Hanley, chief security officer, GitHub.

GitHub has shared a timeline of this month's security breach when a threat actor gained access to and stole private repositories belonging to dozens of organizations. The attacker used stolen OAuth app tokens issued to Heroku and Travis-CI to breach GitHub.com customer accounts with authorized Heroku or Travis CI OAuth app integrations.