Dropbox discloses unauthorized access to 130 GitHub source code repositories

Dropbox disclosed a security breach, threat actors gained unauthorized access to 130 of its source code repositories on GitHub.

File hosting service Dropbox announced that threat actors gained unauthorized access to 130 of its source code repositories on GitHub.

According to the advisory published by Dropbox, the company was the target of a phishing campaign that resulted in access to the GitHub repositories. The investigation revealed that the code accessed by the attackers contained some credentials, primarily, API keys, used by the development team.

The company pointed out that no one’s content, passwords, or payment information were accessed, it also remarked that the issue was quickly resolved.

Dropbox uses CircleCI for select internal deployments, and in early October, a phishing campaign targeted multiple Dropboxers using messages impersonating CircleCI.

“While our systems automatically quarantined some of these emails, others landed in Dropboxers’ inboxes. These legitimate-looking emails directed employees to visit a fake CircleCI login page, enter their GitHub username and password, and then use their hardware authentication key to pass a One Time Password (OTP) to the malicious site.” reads the advisory published by the company. “This eventually succeeded, giving the threat actor access to one of our GitHub organizations where they proceeded to copy 130 of our code repositories.”

The repositories included internal copies of third-party libraries slightly modified for use by Dropbox, internal prototypes, and some tools and configuration files used by the security team of the file hosting service.

Exposed data included a few thousand names and email addresses belonging to Dropbox employees, current and past customers, sales leads, and vendors.

In September 2022, GitHub warned of an ongoing phishing campaign targeting its users to steal credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes by impersonating the CircleCI DevOps platform.

The company learned of the attacks against its users on September 16, it pointed out that the phishing campaign has impacted many victim organizations except GitHub.

Phishing messages claims that a user’s CircleCI session expired and attempt to trick recipients into logging in using GitHub credentials.

“Clicking the link takes the user to a phishing site that looks like the GitHub login page but steals any credentials entered. For users with TOTP-based two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled, the phishing site also relays any TOTP codes to the threat actor and GitHub in real time, allowing the threat actor to break into accounts protected by TOTP-based 2FA. Accounts protected by hardware security keys are not vulnerable to this attack.” reads the advisory published by the Microsoft-owned company.

Recipients are redirected to the phishing pages mimicking GitHub login page designed to steal in real-time the credentials and 2FA code entered by the users.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Github)

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