Skip to main content

Hackers demanding bitcoin payments for code held hostage from GitHub and GitLab

Hackers are demanding bitcoin payments in exchange for code that they have extracted from GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket repositories, through ransom notes that they have left behind for their victims.

Hackers have removed all the source code from the repositories, and in exchange is a ransom note that demands 0.1 bitcoin, which is equivalent to about $570. The hackers claim to be willing to send proof that they are indeed holding the code hostage, backed up on their own servers.

“If we don’t receive your payment in the next 10 days, we will make your code public or use them otherwise,” the hackers wrote to end the ransom note.

There were a total of 392 GitHub repositories that had their commits and code wiped out by an account named gitbackup, which was created seven years ago on January 25, 2012, according to Bleeping Computer. So far, none of the victims have succumbed and paid the ransom to the hackers, which is good as there is no assurance that the code will indeed be returned.

It remains unclear how the hacker or hackers are gaining access to the repositories to be able to wipe out the stored codes and leave behind the ransom note. One user received a response from Atlassian, the company behind Bitbucket and the cross-platform free Git client SourceTree, regarding an attempted breach.

“Within the past few hours, we detected and blocked an attempt — from a suspicious IP address — to log in with your Atlassian account. We believe that someone used a list of login details stolen from third-party services in an attempt to access multiple accounts,” Atlassian told the user.

According to investigations by GitHub, in cooperation with the security teams of other affected companies, there was no evidence that the authentication systems of the repositories were compromised. It appears that the account credentials of the victims were acquired by hackers from third-party exposures, which is one of the risks of using a username and password in more than one service.

GitHub recommends its customers to use two-factor authentication, in conjunction with strong passwords, for better protection. However, one victim said that the hackers were still able to gain access even with two-factor authentication enabled, suggesting a vulnerability within GitHub’s systems.

Editors' Recommendations

Aaron Mamiit
Aaron received a NES and a copy of Super Mario Bros. for Christmas when he was 4 years old, and he has been fascinated with…
GitHub pull requests affected by gender bias, new study suggests
school coding

Evidence that gender bias exists in the field of computer science has emerged in the form of a new study examining acceptance rates of contributions from men and women in an open-source software community. The study's findings indicated that women's contributions were rejected more often, but only if their gender is identifiable. If, in fact, it is unclear whether the contributor is a man or a woman, women's contributions tended to be accepted at a greater rate.

"There are a number of questions and concerns related to gender bias in computer programming, but this project was focused on one specific research question: To what extent does gender bias exist when pull requests are judged on GitHub?" Emerson Murphy-Hill, corresponding author of a paper on the study and an associate professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, told phys.org.

Read more
Valve tells devs bitcoin payments are inbound to Steam
bitcoin future exchanges coming soon bitcoins

Valve has announced that preparations are being made for bitcoin to be accepted as a payment method on its Steam storefront. The system will use an external payment provider, likely the Atlanta-based BitPay Inc., which is considered to be one of the biggest bitcoin payment processors in the world.

The announcement was made via a post to Steam's private developer forms, which was then shared publicly on Reddit. The text refers to bitcoin as an "increasingly popular online payment method" and notes the company's perspective that the payment method "makes Steam an even better place to buy or sell games."

Read more
Microsoft quietly drops Bitcoin support for Microsoft Store payments
bitcoin cash becomes second most valued cryptocurrency

Much was made of Microsoft's move two years ago to start accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment for purchasing content from its online store.

The situation has, however, quietly changed, as the computer giant has recently added a note to its website revealing it's no longer accepting the cryptocurrency in the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 devices.

Read more