Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

CrowdSec Source Code Leak (crowdsec.net)

151 points by eccgecko 17 hours ago

mewse-hn 15 hours ago

Funny to see this after I spent the morning troubleshooting and fixing my crowdsec install on my debian 13 vps. Apparently they stopped supplying a community blocklist to my machine because I'm running the old debian packaged version instead of directly from them (http 500). I had a LLM build a blocklist from publicly available sources rather than tie myself more tightly to their SaaS platform.

getcrunk 14 hours ago

Wait … that’s lame. If it’s in Debian repos I expect it to work with full functionality (up to the version number)

I can understand the myriad reasons for why a company would be inconvenienced by that.

But on the other hand, it seems like a reason for me to never use the vendor

idiotsecant 10 hours ago

I feel like a massive blocklist is simultaneously exactly the kind of thing an LLM is likely to hallucinate and exactly the kind of thing you don't want to rely on an LLM for.

zamadatix 7 hours ago

If they had it build it from public sources then I assume it was combined via tool usage rather than direct generation. Beyond the hallucination risk, the latter would just be a waste of tokens & time.

antonvs 3 hours ago

Modern agent harnesses rely heavily on tools, as well as writing code, to avoid hallucinations affecting deterministic values.

shakna 2 hours ago

tecleandor 10 hours ago

Ah, I have to check that, thanks!

tacomagick 11 hours ago

Ah, I just learned this, thanks for the heads up.

6thbit 13 hours ago 

  > the Tanstack compromise is very likely to have been the leak vector
  ....appears to have been backdoored to extract an API key with authorization to read the private codebase.
  ...
  >  immediately rotated all required tokens & credentials to prevent further incidents.
Rotating the API key doesn't quite put them in a position to "prevent further incidents" does it? The next PyPI/npm supply chain issue will just get the new key?

I suppose whatever they use that key for should be reviewed and re-scoped if possible?

Does github let you restrict where you can originate requests using a given API key? or are we just not there yet?

sandeepkd 17 hours ago

On the funny side, reading the website tagline, apparently they claim to know who is attacking you, they just happen to miss out on who attacked them.

Turns out they are not really a security company, just an aggregator of bad IPs. Ideally this kind of aggregator problem is best suited for a trusted not-for-profit company where providing the data needs some level of credibility and querying the data costs you nominal fee to keep the setup floating.

Meneth 16 hours ago

I suppose CrowdSec isn't used to analyze GitHub's traffic, so they wouldn't have much info to go on.

If they had self-hosted their own repos, they might have had more luck.

sandeepkd 16 hours ago

It wasn't the Github that was compromised, it was the access to their private repository that was compromised so somewhere down the line the security best practices are in question for sure. Self hosted repos available on public internet would have met the same fate, may be worse, given github does provides some level of security.

Even regarding the blast radius, I do not really believe any company is honest about it. They do not have tools to verify it, if the user information was accessed with leaked token or real token. The thing that works in their favor is that no one else can verify it either which absolves them from any responsibility. Any platform engineer knows that your CICD system has the keys to the kingdom.

strictnein 16 hours ago

nicce 16 hours ago

GitHub Enterprise has at least some level audit log

strictnein 16 hours ago

What, exactly, is the definition of a "security company" in your mind? Threat Intel companies definitely fall under that normally, so I'm curious what you think it is.

Also, the idea that this type of thing could just be stood up as a "not-for-profit" company and ran for peanuts is kind of silly. How would the nominal fee pay for the engineers and infrastructure? Or would this just be a volunteer effort and you'd like people to do this for free for you?

sandeepkd 16 hours ago

Any company where understanding of security practices has a direct impact on its revenue from early phases can be considered as a security company in my view.

From what I have seen a large chunk of internet exists and stands on the shoulder of folks who did the volunteer work cause they were passionate about it and enjoyed that part. Once built, the nominal fee for API to check IP address should cover the costs way easily for the servers.

Letsencrypt is a great example, it did took away the big money from all these commercial CA's, who used to issue blue, green and what not kind of checkmarks. Thats one big reason reason why the migration to HTTPS happened faster.

itintheory 16 hours ago

strictnein 16 hours ago

itintheory 16 hours ago

We implemented CrowdSec for bot/scraping mitigation. The architecture is sound, but it ended up having an unacceptable false positive rate for us. This may be an issue with any kind of IP reputation approach. After a couple of months of work getting it ready to go I had to turn it off after a couple of days.

Jnr 16 hours ago

Not sure what you implemented.

They provide several IP blacklists. None of those seem to be false positives. You can also add custom 3rd party blocklists.

They also provide several different rulesets. It is up to you to choose which ones to use and fine tune. LLMs can be very helpful with that.

And there are 3rd party dashboards and tools that help you manage it more easily.

I use the free version as a simple WAF on multiple servers and it blocks a lot of bots. It did require some initial finetuning though.

Are there any better open source solutions?

itintheory 15 hours ago

We had the main community blocklist and several of their pricey paid blocklists enabled in a PoC capacity. We had a lot of legitimate users end up blocked. In some cases these may have been VPN exit nodes, or users on CG-NAT, or devices on a shared network with some other compromised / bot device. I didn't get 100% of the details, just that we were inundated with support requests from real users that ended up blocked.

EvanAnderson 14 hours ago

mazzma 16 hours ago

Interesting, did you implement only IP reputation (via blocklist) or did you deploy the WAF as well? Regarding bot scrapping, you would probably want to try the new bot detection feature recently released

itintheory 15 hours ago

This was just blocklist based. We had the main community list and a handful of the curated paid lists enabled.

wrt bot detection - this sounds very much like Anubis which we're also using with some success.

UltraSane 16 hours ago

I have written my own honeypots to reduce the false positive rate. I simply have things like a VM with RDP and SSH open to the internet and any IP that tries to login gets banned at the firewall for x days. It works really well.

giancarlostoro 16 hours ago

Sounds like an exploit took the credentials needed to extract the code, makes me wonder if a Ubikey + SSL cert for git access would have prevented the entire leak.

sidcool 16 hours ago

Security firm hacked.

steve1977 16 hours ago

Security firm putting their source code on Github

pixl97 16 hours ago

A tale as old as time.

Sweepline 7 hours ago

Oof, a security company leaking its own source code is quite the look. Hope it's not their latest version of the engine.

doodlesdev 6 hours ago

From TFA:

   > CrowdSec source code consists of two parts: a private one and another that hosts our Free Open Source Software (i.e., the Security Engine), which is public by design and therefore out of scope.

Sorrel47 7 hours ago

Time to scrutinize those CrowdSec deployments even closer. Hopefully, it's nothing critical that gets exploited.

miffy900 6 hours ago

> CrowdSec source code consists of two parts: a private one and another that hosts our Free Open Source Software (i.e., the Security Engine), which is public by design and therefore out of scope. The private part, though, contains the source code for our SaaS console, some AWS Cloud routines, some connectors, and automations.

This leak seems incredibly mundane. customers would have the security engine installed, but not the console.

9029 14 hours ago

Not to be confused with CrowdStrike, a serious [0] security company

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...

okokwhatever 13 hours ago

of course... Ask Fable if the private code is valuable or not...

xyst 14 hours ago

yet another security oriented company that doesn’t practice what they preach.

On the flip side, there was allegedly no PII leaked. But this event is still a red flag as it means their internal ops are absolutely shit. So it’s another vendor receiving a PNG flag.

CrowdSec. CrowdStrike.

esafak 13 hours ago

I was going to register http://CrowdShite.com/ but somebody beat me to it.