So... what’s the risk? If a person updated their Ubuntu computers this or last week, are they in trouble?
We can confirm that on 2019-07-06 there was a Canonical owned account on GitHub whose credentials were compromised and used to create repositories and issues among other activities. Canonical has removed the compromised account from the Canonical organisation in GitHub and is still investigating the extent of the breach, but there is no indication at this point that any source code or PII was affected.
Furthermore, the Launchpad infrastructure where the Ubuntu distribution is built and maintained is disconnected from GitHub and there is also no indication that it has been affected.
We plan to post a public update after our investigation, audit and remediations are finished.
Thank you, your trust in Canonical is important to us, which is why we make privacy and security a priority.
-David on behalf of Canonical
[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Infrastructure/Incident...
We require 2FA for all accounts under the lxc organization and only grant the access that's actually needed by those contributors. So while it's not impossible that one of our members' credentials may get compromised, especially when considering the use of access token, current access is as restricted as you would expect for those repositories.
It's also worth noting that because of Git's own design, even should one of those accounts get compromised, it would be fairly simple to spot and revert any changes that may have occurred.
This is out of sheer laziness because a USB stick is easier to plug in than Sata. Today I learned it is now has security features as well :)
Canonical is a great thing in my life. Hope they haven't been hit too hard and that they learn how to prevent it.