Git ransom campaign incident report

https://about.gitlab.com/2019/05/14/git-ransom-campaign-incident-report-atlassian-bitbucket-github-gitlab/

by brntn • 7 years ago

181 71 7 years ago

about.gitlab.com

rossdavidh• 7 years ago

"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again." - Peter Pan movie, Battlestar Galactica, and should be every security incident report ever.

Not saying they shouldn't have issued their analysis, of course they should have, it mostly looks on target. But...it will all happen again.

jedberg• 7 years ago

I just have to say, props to Gitlab for being included in this. For a lot of enterprises that use Github and Bitbucket, this may be their first into to Gitlab.

gumby• 7 years ago

Since literally everybody who has cloned a repo has a full copy of it, and since git is a decentralized revision control system, what on earth can it mean to hold a repo for ransom? The write up even says so: to recover, just push your code back up to our repo.

I really don't understand what they are talking about. It's as if someone showed me a photo of my child and said, "pay me or I'll burn this photograph".

What am I missing?

empath75• 7 years ago

There’s probably a lot of code sitting in private git repos where like one guy worked on it five years ago and then quit the company and gitlab/github might be the only place it exists.

unilynx• 7 years ago

Private repositories. You may not want their contents to become public

NateEag2• 7 years ago

The threat cited in the article said not just that the code would remain deleted, but that it would be "leaked" - presumably many of these were private repos.

You could never trust that the attacker actually deleted their copy of the repo, but then, the whole cryptolocking business model falls down if the attacker isn't at least moderately honest, so I can see why people would respond to that threat.

Someone• 7 years ago

”the whole cryptolocking business model falls down if the attacker isn't at least moderately honest”

Nitpick: it only requires most attackers to be somewhat honest. Having a few unscrupulous ones may make life harder for the “honest” ones, but they themselves can be better of, e.g. by, after receiving payment, demanding more money.

caprese• 7 years ago

its easier to trust private hackers than organizations that have the law on their side

society works with mutual cooperation and hackers seem to understand that more than the "technically cooperating in this context" that the legal field would employ

cwkoss2• 7 years ago

Vast majority of cryptolockers are fake, they just keep asking for more and more money but never unlock.

(This is probably not true, but society would benefit from "cryptolockers are usually fake" being in the zeitgeist)

bin0• 7 years ago

For what it's worth, I really hope people don't pay if they can avoid it. Guy I know consults for a company which recently got ransomware. They had insurance, payed $1.5 million, got their files back. FBI came in and figured out it was the north koreans. This is happening more and more often, and will increase as we continue sanctions pressure.

This is a classic prisoners' dilemma: if no one payed, every one would be better off, but it is very hard to be that one guy or company who loses all his files for the "greater good".

ajross• 7 years ago

How certain are you that the photo archive you use had a copy of that photo? I mean, yeah, most people have local trees. Inevitably someone won't, and like spam this is a volume scam.

p1necone• 7 years ago

In my experience there's enough people who don't understand how git works for a shotgun approach to find plenty of marks to fool.

bregma• 7 years ago

Your experience converges with mine.

rileymat2• 7 years ago

I don't keep all my git code local, only the projects I am currently working on.

bigiain2• 7 years ago

Do you rely on just one 3rd party like gitlab/bitbucket/github to keep your _only_ copy of your non-current projects?

That seems unwise. I don't have many local repos on this 128GB MacBookAir, but as well as BitBucket all the projects I have ever worked on are on other several machines and/or hard drives I have locally, and also zipped up in S3 buckets and on tarsnap.

Like they say, there's two kinds of people. People who've lost important data because they didn't back it up properly, and people who haven't yet.

Ancient• 7 years ago

Repo's with remaining ransom file: https://github.com/search?q=1ES14c7qLb5CYhLMUekctxLgc1FV2Ti9...

sverhagen• 7 years ago

Weird, weren't GitHub and friends restoring these repositories for these unlucky users?

ralph843• 7 years ago

I assume they're trying to contact the repo owners to see how they want to proceed. Even if the change seems obvious, changing the contents of a repo is definitely a case where the git host should involve the owner of the repo (barring ToS violations).

ralph843• 7 years ago

2FA is great for the web UI, but none of these vendors make it particularly easy to enforce 2FA on the command line.

nathanaldensr• 7 years ago

Exactly. PATs are designed to circumvent human intervention (MFA) for authentication in order to support automation. I am very curious if there's a better way than PATs.

tonny747• 7 years ago

ssh keys with a passphrase?

ekarulf• 7 years ago

SSH keys on a YubiKey

nhumrich• 7 years ago

An ssh key is 2FA

michaelmior3• 7 years ago

How so? An SSH key is a single factor. You could argue that a password-protected private key provides a second factor, but that still falls in the category of "something you know."

ralph843• 7 years ago

An SSH key is one factor. There are various methods for protecting the key with additional factors, but none of the git hosts provide a way to require those additional factors. So as an org owner you're left either trusting every one of your users not to get sloppy with keys, or installing spyware on their computers to make sure they're not using unprotected keys.

mplewis• 7 years ago

I use Krypt.co. It stores my private key in my mobile device only. I can hook up any device to use it as my SSH key, but the key never leaves the device. Instead, it signs all requests only once I authorize them interactively.

heelhook• 7 years ago

Seems like no one fell for this though. https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1ES14c7qLb5CYhLMUekct...

avian• 7 years ago

Probably a unique wallet in each message. It seems to be that way in scam email ransoms.

kristofferc• 7 years ago

Doesn't seem that way: https://github.com/search?q=1ES14c7qLb5CYhLMUekctxLgc1FV2Ti9...

penagwin• 7 years ago

Is it common that companies share intelligence like this? I think it's a wonderful idea, given they all operate on essentially the same service (git) they share similar security concerns.

smudgymcscmudge• 7 years ago

It took exceptional circumstances, but it was the right call in this case. All were working toward the same goal. We can all go back to our war after the white walkers are dealt with (don’t bring Cersei up or it ruins the analogy)

WrtCdEvrydy2• 7 years ago

In the Cybersecurity field, yes!

You'd be surprised how often you'll be rolling up to your competition to compare the virus files you pulled from each of your networks and reverse engineering on VMs together... then next week you have to pretend you hate them until something else goes wrong again.

shapov• 7 years ago

I didn't see it mentioned in the article, but did any of the 3 companies confirm that the repos have been actually cloned as the attackers suggest?

mlindner• 7 years ago

1. Stop using 'git add .' This is a bad habit I see people keep suggesting to new git users. Stop recommending it and stop doing it.

2. Never store your password in .git/config. Why are you doing that? That shouldn't be stored in .git/config.

benburleson• 7 years ago

Why are people using passwords instead of keys?

morpheuskafka• 7 years ago

Why do people even have passwords that don't require 2FA?

jwilk• 7 years ago

"Stupid corporate firewall blocks SSH connections" would be my guess.

darklajid• 7 years ago

Maybe I misunderstood something, but I read the text as people (or .. services like the three doing the announcement) offering URLs containing an access token?

As in https://example.com/mlindner/project1/821372asd1786d21das or something?

If you use this approach to manage access to a repository, then .. that gets stored in the .git/config. No need to store a password or something.

(Then again, maybe I didn't understand the explanation correctly?)

chrischen2• 7 years ago

How does one withdraw bitcoin to fiat or even use it without it being traceable? Are there laundering or anonymizing services for bitcoin withdrawals to fiat?

leethargo• 7 years ago

AFAIK there have been bitcoin laundering services for years (bitcoin in, bitcoin out).

As for spending, there used to be pre-loaded credit cards that you could from bitcoin.

chrischen2• 7 years ago

Wouldn't the credit cards be traceable (record of where you spent it). It wouldn't necessarily tie you exactly but it'd create a large paper-trail.

Legogris• 7 years ago

The BTC could be used as payments for services or products which don't require identification (and holding "dirty" BTC is now the problem of the sand celler if they ever want to take it to traditional businesses in jurisdictions that enforce KYC for BTC payments).

Criminals can also trade BTC for physical cash.

They could also by some means (for example permissionless decentralized exchanges) convert it to a cryptocurrency with private transaction properties such as ZCash, Monero, Beam or GRIN and then back again.

The "laundering services" you refer to (generally called "mixers") are still around but most of them have been shown reversible with high degrees of confidence. CoinJoin is the state of the art here, with the most well-known implementations being JoinMarket and Wasabi Wallet.

But in general law enforcement and investigators are definitely wising up to cryptocurrencies and to be fully untraceable one has to go through a lot of hoops and not make a single mistake in the process. Even the above mentioned approaches can leak information that can be used to tie an individual to the transactions if not executed properly.

Most likely they will use the same tried and true approach they would have used for stolen fiat funds; identity theft. I personally know people who have been drawn into a criminal investigation for money laundering because they had been initiated a transaction selling BTC on LocalBitcoins via bank transfer (unwise unless you know and trust the person), turned out already stolen BTC had been converted into fiat on a compromised bank account, which was then supposed to be converted into "clean" BTC again. Fortunately the investigation was already underway when the transaction happened, my friends bank account was blocked as a result when the transfer was initiated and the whole thing was sorted out in the end.

falsedan2• 7 years ago

Otherwise, you can still clone the repository and make use of: git reflog or git fsck to find your last commit and change the HEAD.

I don't understand: when I clone a repo, I get a copy of all the branches/tags and the commits they point to & the trees/blobs from those commits. If the repo is wiped, I get a single master branch with a single commit with a single tree and a single blob, and no reflog because that is local to the repo, and I (as a fresh cloner) haven't updated any refs.

Perhaps they are thinking about a mirror clone? That still won't include the reflog, but you can at least find dangling commits and guess which one was master.

falsedan2• 7 years ago

Oops, mirror clone only includes reachable commits. No idea what the 'Otherwise' clarification means then, it sounds bogus

Git ransom campaign incident report

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