This (IMO) points to a perverse reality: things need to get worse before they can get better. In other words, Microsoft probably needs to feel more pain (in the form of negative revenue pressure) before they take their own platform responsibilities (vis a vis not distributing malware) seriously.

We say this play out recently with improvements to GitHub Actions security, I expect we'll see the same here.

(Edit: to be absolutely clear, I have first-hand experience that GitHub's security folks work extremely hard, and are often doing the kinds of invisible, thankless "deck-swabbing" work that nobody even thinks about. They're just under-resourced.)

Does GH get money for taking these actions? Do they have any monetary incentive other than 'their reputation', which clearly isn't changing usage, to improve? Maybe the best question here is why is it that after a lot of black eyes on data usage, reliability and monitoring aren't people switching. What keeps you using GH after stories like this?

I have a suggestion. PyPi and similar package managers should start publishing security warnings about the hosts of projects. That in turn can eventually lead to bans of packages from generally insecure places. Maybe if we start seeing 'WARNING: projects from github.com may contain malware!' after doing pip install XXX MS will start listening.

The initial report was investigated and resolved, with the removal of specific repositories. GitHub likely lacks ability to prevent the attacker from repeating the attack (this is potentially a hard technical problem to solve depending on the infrastructure, available telemetry and how the threat actor is performing their attack).

Once that initial report was resolved, the ticket was closed, archived, and the team moved on. No one is going to sit and re-check a blog post to see if it is updated. That just doesn't happen anywhere, not just at GitHub. Likely a separate ticket was created though to see if they could identify the root cause (compromised accounts, spam attack, etc) and potentially address it. That analysis takes time though and AI doesn't provide much value in scaling here (yet).

> All they needed to do was allocate a few days for any regular employee so they could use Copilot to find all these repositories and block them.

That statement in particular shows a poor understanding of malicious repositories. Blocking on a string signature is almost always worthless as that is a brittle signature and very easy for an actor to identify (that the actor is being blocked by said string).

If you're going to block malicious uploads you need something much more concrete than a string. Having a bot search periodically via regular expressions to remove things on a brittle signature runs the risk of blocking a non-malicious repository. Even if the regular expression is perfect, the threat actor would realize relatively quickly what is going on.

If the threat actor is infecting repositories via compromising GitHub accounts, blocking the repository also does little to resolve the problem as the account remains compromised.

Preventing spam or malware problems at scale in any organization the size of GitHub to date not solved well. Social media platforms (using these as an example as they have comparable scale) still struggle with spam and they have more telemetry and experience dealing with such things.

They're just limping along. In reality, I think Microsoft wants to kill the GitHub brand, they're just doing it slowly, feeding poison.

It costs them nothing to blame the user for clicking links that they don't trust, even though they're hosting the links...

Simple: further action was not requested in the Jira ticket, and what is not in a Jira ticket is not getting done because the team responsible for doing the needful is already overloaded with other crap.

Or maybe because the higher-up whose authorization is needed to go on a few days worth of deep dive other than doing exactly what is asked and accounted for in tickets doesn't have the time for a few minutes to explain to them why it is needed, or the higher-up needs authorization from finance or legal first.

Obvious /s, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is exactly what happened. If I were to guess, the "legal" is my biggest suspicion - if a provider reacts on notice of illegal/harmful content, they're just fulfilling legal obligations. But if they go and actively wade through the archives to find more incriminating content, that might be construed as Github doing active moderation of their own, leading to a loss of pure content hoster legal protections.

The instability and security issues that come of relying on the software supply chain has been pointed out for around 30 years. Seriously, go look. Multiple articles have pointed out the problems we’re seeing.

I used to ask the same question on behalf of clients but after multiple non-answers and silence my response now is just put something between you and GitHub that you can control.