In an announcement, the Libretro / RetroArch mentioned how the Libretro / RetroArch organization on GitHub was attacked by hackers and they managed to do quite a bit of damage.
While restoration is ongoing, some of it is going to be more difficult. In the announcement, they mentioned the scale of the damage that was done comes down to:
- He accessed our buildbot server and crippled the nightly/stable buildbot services, and the netplay lobby service. Right now, the Core Updater won’t work. The websites for these have also been rendered inaccessible for the moment
- He gained access to our Libretro organization on Github impersonating a very trusted member of the team and force-pushed a blank initial commit to a fair percentage of our repositories, effectively wiping them. He managed to do damage to 3 out of 9 pages of repositories. RetroArch and everything preceding it on page 3 has been left intact before his access got curtailed.
GitHub themselves have replied (source) to mentioned they can't help, so they're now relying on local backups and Git history from their developers to get it back to where it was online.
Some good news though: for users they said no Cores or RetroArch installs should be considered compromised, as the attacker was too busy with wiping things and being a nuisance. However, thanks to it the Core installer is offline as are the 'Update Assets', 'Update Overlays', 'Update Shaders' functions.
Also mentioned is how they didn't have automated backups of their buildbot, a service which helps to automate building the application and testing. Something that's generally vital for larger projects. They said it's due to funding, as they don't have enough for it with a note about supporting them on Patreon to help.
This is another reminder of: backups, backups—backups! More than that though, it's also an example of why two factor authentication is also vitally important. This little detail was left out of their announcement, but they didn't force 2FA which appears to be how the attacker actually got in. Speaking on Twitter, they mentioned how some developers felt it was "too much of a pain" and they didn't want to lose those contributors. Well, was it worth it? Let's hope proper security will be implemented now.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: vipor29they should of known they needed to do that and now the flood gates are gonna come down on them for it.its there own fault.Libretro is an open source, community driven, low-funded project about playing retro games, and the hack was not about leaking private data, but about crippling a github repo.
Let's be reasonable, please. They don't have to know everything about security, they have the right to be wrong, it is not a bank.
Last edited by Creak on 17 August 2020 at 5:19 pm UTC
slaapliedje Aug 17, 2020
1) aforementioned someone testing their skills
2) aforementioned bitter IP holder
3) FPGA vs Emulation vs Real hardware battle. RetroWar 2020!
4) There is no number 4
5) Simplest explanation, someone screwed up and they're blaming it on a hack.
Quoting: CreakQuoting: vipor29they should of known they needed to do that and now the flood gates are gonna come down on them for it.its there own fault.Libretro is an open source, community driven, low-funded project about playing retro games, and the hack was not about leaking private data, but about crippling a github repo.
Let's be reasonable, please. They don't have to know everything about security, they have the right to be wrong, it is not a bank.
again use a backup no excuse.
Quoting: vipor29again use a backup no excuse.
Indeed. The problem there is that it's presumed that the hosting service would actually take care of that as it's one of the features of most services. Couple this with git having a backup of pretty much everything there... It's more about finding out the hosting service didn't do backups (oops) and figuring out which is the cleanest clone with the good history you have to restore.
It's more a pain in the ass than anything else. Nothing QUITE like you're making it out to be.
Quoting: MilesDid they protect their default (master/main) branch and require pull requests with approvals to do any merges? Admin accounts with the power to override shouldn't be used for anything beyond setting things up, I would think. Preferring NOT to use 2FA is the real surprise to me. Wow! :/ Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Stay secure, my friends.
This presumes that your admin/control accounts aren't hacked/compromised. Once that happens...all bets are off.
From my admittedly limited understanding...that's what happened there.
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