The biggest story, by far, even if it didn’t get any media coverage, was Slack’s secret data breach disclosure published just ahead of New Year’s Eve.
The company said a threat actor stole “Slack employee tokens” and gained access to its GitHub source code repositories.
This happened on December 27, according to Slack, and the company disclosed the breach four days later, on December 31, so a pretty quick turnaround from detection to disclosure.
The incident is eerily similar to what Okta disclosed ahead of Christmas when the company also found that someone used a TravisCI token to gain access to its GitHub repos. Just like Okta, Slack said the intruder didn’t gain access to its main infrastructure or to any customer data.
It’s unclear if the two incidents are related, as both disclosures lack fine-grained details about what’s what. You can blame lawyer-speak for that.
We did reach out to GitHub before Christmas to see if this wave of attacks targeting the private repos of major companies was a new iteration of an incident GitHub disclosed in April, but we have not heard back.
Alex Lim
Alex Lim is a certified IT Technical Support Architect with over 15 years of experience in designing, implementing, and troubleshooting complex IT systems and networks. He has worked for leading IT companies, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco, providing technical support and solutions to clients across various industries and sectors. Alex has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the National University of Singapore and a master’s degree in information security from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the author of several best-selling books on IT technical support, such as The IT Technical Support Handbook and Troubleshooting IT Systems and Networks. Alex lives in Bandar, Johore, Malaysia with his wife and two chilrdren. You can reach him at [email protected] or follow him on Website | Twitter | Facebook
