GitHub Confirms Breach, 4K Internal Repos Stolen

Open source software giant GitHub confirmed a data breach this week involving the theft of thousands of repos. One threat actor — TeamPCP — took credit.

GitHub confirmed today it was breached via an attacker that stole thousands of internal repositories.

"As always this is not a ransom. We do not care extorting GitHub, 1 buyer and we shred the data on our end, it looks like our retirement is soon so if no buyer is found we will leak it free," the post read.

"Our current assessment is that the activity involved exfiltration of GitHub-internal repositories only. The attacker's current claims of ~3,800 repositories are directionally consistent with our investigation so far," the series of posts read. "We moved quickly to reduce risk. Critical secrets were rotated yesterday and overnight with the highest-impact credentials prioritized first. We continue to analyze logs, validate secret rotation, and monitor for any follow-on activity. We will take additional action as the investigation warrants. We will publish a fuller report once the investigation is complete."

TeamPCP has become a force to be reckoned with for developers in recent months. Security experts have pinned the Shai-Hulud self-replicating worm attacks that began last year to TeamPCP, and it has further targeted organizations in credential attacks and more. Most recently, TeamPCP published the source code of Shai-Hulud to GitHub in an effort to spread the worm even further .

The idea that TeamPCP would hit GitHub through a poisoned version of a Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension (or perhaps a typosquatted application) is well within the threat actor's capabilities, as many of its recent campaigns have involved such threat activity.

It is notable that the Microsoft-owned GitHub was compromised through a VS Code extension a year after GitHub committed itself to open source software security and two years after Microsoft committed itself to improved security practices. VS Code, a Microsoft format, isn't necessarily a Microsoft extension. So while breach victims deserve a bit of grace, the threat to the open source ecosystem has been well established for months.

Roy Akerman, head of cloud and identity security for vendor Silverfort, tells Dark Reading that this attack happened because the trust model around developer tooling is "fundamentally broken."

"A VS Code extension runs with the same privileges as the editor itself, and once installed it has access to everything the developer can reach," he says. "There's no meaningful verification before that code executes. What makes this breach remarkable isn't the entry point, it's that TeamPCP used GitHub's own infrastructure as the weapon end to end. They leveraged compromised developer tooling and trusted release workflows to distribute malicious code, including the poisoned VS Code extension that reached a GitHub employee's machine."

Kayne McGladrey, senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), echoed the concern VS Code extensions running with full trust, "which means that they get access to the developer's filesystem, credentials, cloud keys, SSH keys, and environment variables."

Dark Reading contacted GitHub for additional .

Senior News Writer, Dark Reading

Alex is an award-winning writer, journalist, and podcast host based in Boston. After cutting his teeth writing for independent gaming publications as a teenager, he graduated from Emerson College in 2016 with a Bachelor of Science in journalism. He has previously been published on VentureFizz, Security, Nintendo World Report, and elsewhere.

At Dark Reading, he covers a variety of cybersecurity topics, including the cybercrime ecosystem, open source security, and the intersection between AI and threat actors. In his spare time, Alex hosts the weekly Nintendo podcast, "Talk Nintendo Podcast," and works on personal writing projects, including two previously self-published science fiction novels.

He has received numerous awards, including TechTarget's Writer of the Year in 2022 as well as more than 10 Azbee awards for his reporting between 2022 and today.

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