<story><title>Repositories held for ransom by using valid credentials</title><url>https://about.gitlab.com/2019/05/03/suspicious-git-activity-security-update/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avar</author><text>&amp;gt; We believe that no data has been lost, unless the [...] GitLab copy was the only one.&lt;p&gt;One difference between how GitLab and GitHub run their infrastructure is that GitLab doesn&amp;#x27;t keep reflogs, and uses git&amp;#x27;s default &amp;quot;gc&amp;quot; settings.&lt;p&gt;As a result they won&amp;#x27;t have the data in question anymore in many cases[1]. Well, I don&amp;#x27;t 100% know that for sure, but it&amp;#x27;s the default configuration of their software, and I&amp;#x27;m assuming they use like that themselves.&lt;p&gt;Whereas GitHub does keep reflogs, and runs &amp;quot;git repack&amp;quot; with the &amp;quot;--keep-unreachable&amp;quot; option. They don&amp;#x27;t usually delete git data unless someone bothers to manually do it, and they usually have data to reconstruct repositories as they were at any given point in time.&lt;p&gt;GitHub doesn&amp;#x27;t expose that to users in any way, although perhaps they&amp;#x27;d take pity on some of their users after such an incident.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t a critique of GitLab, just trivia about the storage trade-offs different major Git hosting sites have made, which might be informative to some other people.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m surprised no major Git hosting site has opted to provide such a &amp;quot;we have a snapshot of every version ever&amp;quot; feature. People would probably pay for it, you could even make them opt to pay for access to backups you kept already if they screwed things up :)&lt;p&gt;1. Well, maybe as disaster backups or something. But those are harder to access...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lostmyoldone</author><text>Re GitHub keeping unreachable data, if I understand it right, isn&amp;#x27;t that GitHub painting a giant target on their back?
Wouldn&amp;#x27;t that that imply every secret accidentally committed and then &amp;#x27;deleted&amp;#x27; is still accessible, when one would expect it not to be?
It&amp;#x27;s one thing to have your source code in the wild, but pairing it up with thought-to-be-deleted secrets would be an absolute disaster.&lt;p&gt;Certainly one should not ever keep using a secret once it has escaped into a Git repo, but I&amp;#x27;m sure it happens quite frequently.</text></comment>
<story><title>Repositories held for ransom by using valid credentials</title><url>https://about.gitlab.com/2019/05/03/suspicious-git-activity-security-update/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avar</author><text>&amp;gt; We believe that no data has been lost, unless the [...] GitLab copy was the only one.&lt;p&gt;One difference between how GitLab and GitHub run their infrastructure is that GitLab doesn&amp;#x27;t keep reflogs, and uses git&amp;#x27;s default &amp;quot;gc&amp;quot; settings.&lt;p&gt;As a result they won&amp;#x27;t have the data in question anymore in many cases[1]. Well, I don&amp;#x27;t 100% know that for sure, but it&amp;#x27;s the default configuration of their software, and I&amp;#x27;m assuming they use like that themselves.&lt;p&gt;Whereas GitHub does keep reflogs, and runs &amp;quot;git repack&amp;quot; with the &amp;quot;--keep-unreachable&amp;quot; option. They don&amp;#x27;t usually delete git data unless someone bothers to manually do it, and they usually have data to reconstruct repositories as they were at any given point in time.&lt;p&gt;GitHub doesn&amp;#x27;t expose that to users in any way, although perhaps they&amp;#x27;d take pity on some of their users after such an incident.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t a critique of GitLab, just trivia about the storage trade-offs different major Git hosting sites have made, which might be informative to some other people.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m surprised no major Git hosting site has opted to provide such a &amp;quot;we have a snapshot of every version ever&amp;quot; feature. People would probably pay for it, you could even make them opt to pay for access to backups you kept already if they screwed things up :)&lt;p&gt;1. Well, maybe as disaster backups or something. But those are harder to access...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the_duke</author><text>They do keep disk snapshots for 2 weeks though (created twice a day).&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;about.gitlab.com&amp;#x2F;handbook&amp;#x2F;engineering&amp;#x2F;infrastructure&amp;#x2F;design&amp;#x2F;disaster-recovery&amp;#x2F;#repository-data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;about.gitlab.com&amp;#x2F;handbook&amp;#x2F;engineering&amp;#x2F;infrastructure...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>