Preventing Crypto Mining Abuse on Gitlab.com SaaS

SaaS abuse unfortunately isn’t new.

On our SaaS app, we had to introduce a Captcha when adding users to an account. Spammers would write scripts to continually add, send welcome emails, and then delete users (getting around the 5 free user limit). They would place their spam in the account name, and the users first and last name.

Before we caught it, they were sending thousands of emails a minute via our paid-for upstream transactional email provider.

If it’s free, it’ll get abused eventually.

Very interesting... Obviously imperfect, but couldn't they just find a way to identify if a miner is running on the pipeline? Antivirus heuristics come to mind, but I'm not an expert at all in these topics.

> Include public projects in pipeline minutes quota for free users.

Does that mean they just changed open-source projects from unlimited build minutes to 400 minutes a month? E.g. a single build a day if your build is 13 min (summing up every job's duration)?

I really doubt credit cards will fix this, it's probably not hard to get lots of new credit card numbers (legitimately or otherwise.)

Happening on GitHub for ages too