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.
        • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
          141·
          5 months 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.

            • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
              61·
              5 months ago

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

                • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  61·
                  5 months 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.

                • just another dev@lemmy.my-box.devEnglish
                  51·
                  5 months 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!

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
      112·
      5 months ago

      This is “hack” like the kid that guessed your grandma’s Facebook password is “ilovecats1953”, “hacked” Facebook.

    • sab@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Exposed credentials means that somebody got sloppy the password. So yeah, “stolen creds”. Give the fact that a) NYT seems knows which credentials were exposed, and b) We haven’t seen hundreds of other high(er) profile companies have their private repos breached, it is far more likely that NYT fucked up, and not Microsoft (which is what you implied, with nothing to back it up - other than a very narrow-minded definition of the word hack).