The New York Times notified an undisclosed number of contributors that some of their sensitive personal information was stolen and leaked after its GitHub repositories were breached in January 2024.
  • The New York Times suffered a breach of its GitHub repositories in January 2024, leading to the theft and leak of sensitive personal information of freelancers.
  • Attackers accessed the repos using exposed credentials, but the breach did not impact the newspaper’s internal systems or operations.
  • The stolen data, amounting to 273GB, was leaked on 4chan and included various personal details of contributors as well as information related to assignments and source code, including the viral Wordle game.
  • helenslunchEnglish
    114·
    13 days ago

    …because they didn’t adequately protect them?

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      131·
      13 days ago

      It is not Microsoft’s job to protect your password, it is yours.

      Or did you assume it was GitHub itself that was compromised? The article doesn’t say where the creds were obtained. My guess is plain old phishing. Though it could also be cred-stealing malware, that seems to be making a comeback, in the form of browser extensions and mobile apps. Either way, those aren’t Microsoft’s fault.

      • helenslunchEnglish
        14·
        13 days ago

        Or did you assume it was GitHub itself that was compromised?

        That’s the way it reads to me.

        My guess is plain old phishing.

        Going back to my previous comment, if it was obtained through fishing, there would be no need for “hacking”.

        • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
          51·
          13 days ago

          “Hacking” is a catch all term for security breaches, including phishing to the general public.

            • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
              61·
              13 days ago

              Yes it is. You can be a pedantic a-hole all you want, but “hacking” includes phishing, social engineering and pretty much any other form of access control circumvention to the general public.

              Edit:

              Also from the article itself

              A ‘readme’ file in the archive states that the threat actor used an exposed GitHub token to access the company’s repositories and steal the data.

              Exposed GitHub token is very likely someone messed up and either exposed a token or was victim to an attack that could pull the token. Those are not uncommon and have happened to a lot of companies.

      • helenslunchEnglish
        18·
        13 days ago

        My guy, the citation is this entire article.

          • helenslunchEnglish
            15·
            13 days ago

            It doesn’t say they leaked anything, it says they were hacked.

            • just another dev@lemmy.my-box.devEnglish
              51·
              13 days ago

              As The Times told BleepingComputer last week, the attackers used exposed credentials to hack into the newspaper’s GitHub repos.

              It explicitly says the credentials were leaked. If you’re really going to insist the word “hack” implies something else, I’m afraid you’re too far on the spectrum for me to continue this conversation. Cya!

              • helenslunchEnglish
                17·
                13 days ago

                I’ve already explained this several times and I won’t do it again. If you’re still confused, scroll up and read again.