The RubyGems "Security Incident"
andre.arko.net
andre.arko.net
Rubygems.org AWS Root Access Event – September 2025
That said, I really don't like the hand waving of the HTTP log thing in this post. Yeah sure, company names aren't as sensitive/radioactive as an SSN or an email, but selling usage data isn't exactly a noble endeavor.
I don't think anyone comes out of this looking good. Some are worse than others, sure, but this is just a mess from top to bottom.
And reading this, and the other disclosure from Ruby Central, they seem to be handling this maintainer/employee offboarding woefully incompetently at really, really basic levels. Obtaining control to secret management and doing a general secret rotation of management secrets isn't an obscure first step.
> We may share aggregate or de-identified information with third parties for research, marketing, analytics, and other purposes, provided such information does not identify a particular individual.
What "hand waving"? André explicitly mentioned he did not have any log or information.
> I have no interest in any PII, commercially or otherwise. As my private email published by Ruby Central demonstrates, my entire proposal was based solely on company-level information, with no information about individuals included in any way.
Here Andre is downplaying his ask of the logs. Even if Andre didn't get them, the logs were desired. Had Ruby Central acquiesced the logs would've been parsed and sold. Might not be an issue for you but I am frankly not interested in having any data shared or sold like this.
The incident is clear cut and makes RubyCentral staff look incompetent. They cut off access to 1password and did not even consider that someone may have a copy of the credentials somewhere? As in "maybe in their head"? Rotating shared credentials in such a situation is security 101 and they failed. And when Andre notifies them that they failed, instead of quietly saying "Thanks, we've fixed that", they make it a security incident and include - without any further context - a single email from something that must have been a longer conversation.
My current read is that RC majorly botched the takeover, demonstrated gaps in security know-how, and then retroactively framed everything as a problem with André. The details of the logs are mostly immaterial to the rest of the claims, but are still suspicious enough to spice up the announcement. I believe this because, at the moment, I don't see anything in the original RC post that wasn't satisfactorily explained by this post.
Yeah you do. They're intentionally smearing him. (And they're no better at doing that than they are at security.)
Which the privacy policy of RubyCentral allows, so I don't get why they suddenly have ethical problems with that, apart of course from throwing shade on Andre. Parsing logs for company access is what basically everyone does, and frankly, I don't see the problem with getting leads from data like this. That has nothing to do with "selling PII".
The best argument you could make is that gem owners should be able to see “who” downloads their gems. If they were self-hosting the packages, they would have that data. Of course, charging for it is the ookier part.
EDIT: oh, you might be referring to the RubyCentral statement. I didn't read the original security incident text, so my bad here. Sorry.
I do not feel like I'm reading between any lines here-- Ruby Central directly showed that André Arko asked for the data to sell in order to cover the on-call fees. Yes, they have reason to smear him and shouldn't be trusted, but André confirms that he asked for the logs. None of that is up for debate, these are just the facts!
What we can argue about is 1) whether this is meaningfully different than what RC does already as noted by their ToS and 2) whether or not company names derived from the HTTP logs is sensitive or whatever. It is my position that neither André nor RC should be selling this sort of usage data, regardless of motivation. Personally I think the monetization of such data is bad in general, but I understand not everyone feels the same. It just gives me the ick.
EDIT: Immediately after submitting this, I saw that you issued a correction. Bad timing on my part I suppose!
I think an offer of covering all the 2nd level support costs in return for the right - that Ruby Central's own T&Cs grant - to monetise company usage stats, is a reasonable offer.
The "other side's" alternative was to steal ownership and control of a whole bunch of volunteer gem authors work at the behest of a different corporate sponsor who was clearly demonstrating they wanted to be able to not only throw their weight around and force policies and priorities on RubyGems/RubyCentral, but also to make it personal by explicitly calling for long term contributors to be removed entirely on a whim.
We all do see things very differently.
Arko is not a completely innocent, non-self-interested character here. He has announced a project to end-run the existing rubygems, bundler, etc infrastructure before all this, in the name of "better tooling", but his tooling is solely owned by him and a handful of people that really, really don't like DHH. Controlling this aspect of the ruby toolchain ecosystem is in their own self-interest and overlaps with their deep disdain for the politics and corporate nature of the existing stewards of the ruby toolchain ecosystem. Maybe their approach and stewardship of this fork of the toolchain is more just, secure and equitable, but make no mistake -- they are fighting the same war that DHH and Shopify are, which is who controls the keys to the toolchain. Do you think if Arko, Perham, et. al. had control they would somehow be completely neutral, apolitical stewards of the ecosystem? No! They have made it clear with their money and machinations that they do not want to operate in the same ecosystem as DHH and their politics and ethics are intertwined with their relationship to the ruby community. They are no different than him.
Meanwhile those of us who just want stability are stuck between two factions who claim righteousness and ownership. I wish they all could be deposed and some more mature non-individual foundation could take over.
What it does reveal is the fragility of a community that can seemingly be disrupted because of a single controversial blog post from a guy known to be controversial. This has counter-intuitively elevated DHH's position to that of a lynchpin, accentuating his importance as opposed to pressing him into obscurity.
I personally found DHH's take reprehensible and whatever respect I had for the man has all but vanished, but the Ruby community really does like to throw the baby out with the bathwater sometimes.
Beyond that, yes...the Ruby community is dramatic and this is not the first time a furore has been made over some inter-community conflict with a bunch of reactionary stuff kicking off.
> September 18 2025 18:40 UTC: Ruby Central notifies Mr. Arko, via email, of the board’s decision to remove his RubyGems.org production access, and the termination of his on-call services.
> Marty Haught sent an email to the team within minutes, at 12:47pm PDT [19:47 UTC?], saying he was (direct quote) “terribly sorry” and “I messed up”. [...] the complete silence from Shan and the board, made it impossible to tell exactly who had been authorized to take what actions. As this situation occurred, I was the primary on-call.
André also mentioned that he disclosed further remaining production access a few days ago, on Oct 5. Looking forward to Ruby Central's followup post-incident review for this subsequent incident, which they failed to address or mention at all in their initial publication.
All of them really, not just Marty H.
This context does slightly soften my view, especially the part about multiple 1Password accounts being in play. However there is a big thing still missing to me... Why would Arko not immediately notify RC that he had changed the password due to these concerns?
If it was really a noble good faith action by the assigned on-call, giving a heads up to the remaining stakeholders would be the obligatory next step, no?
According to RC's timeline, the password reset happened on September 19, but Arko did not disclose the issue to RC until September 30. From what I can tell, he has not refuted that timeline or explained the gap.
"The erratic and contradictory communication supplied by Marty Haught, and the complete silence from Shan and the board, made it impossible to tell exactly who had been authorized to take what actions. As this situation occurred, I was the primary on-call. My contractual, paid responsibility to Ruby Central was to defend the RubyGems.org service against potential threats. "
and
"Given Marty’s claims, the sudden permission deletions made no sense. Worried about the possibility of hacked accounts or some sort of social engineering, I took action as the primary on-call engineer to lock down the AWS account and prevent any actions by possible attackers."
and
"Within a couple of days, Ruby Central made an (unsigned) public statement, and various board members agreed to talk directly to maintainers. At that point, I realized that what I thought might have been a malicious takeover was both legitimate and deliberate, and Marty would never “fix the permissions structure”, or “follow up more” as he said. Once I understood the situation, I backed off to let Ruby Central take care of their “security audit”. I left all accounts in a state where they could recover access."
> According to RC's timeline, the password reset happened on September 19, but Arko did not disclose the issue to RC until September 30.
The password reset happened on September 19, and "within a few days" he realised it was an intentional/malicious takeover, and he walked away knowing they had the means to recover their own access - no longer his monkeys, no longer his circus. The 30 Sep date was when he was asked by someone if he still had access, and he discovered he did, and let them know immediately.
That all seems way more likely to be true and feels more plausible than anything Ruby Central has published over the last month or so...
1) If you're actually concerned about phishing or some sort of hack, all the more reason to pick up the phone and hash things out. Arko knew his AWS access was revoked on the 18. You either believe that is an error and get to the bottom of it ASAP, or you step back and accept it for what it is. Resetting the root password silently the next day is like an inconsistent half measure.
2) As you quote, he had a "contractual, paid" relationship with Ruby Central. In contrast to the GitHib repos, there was never ambiguity that RC owned the AWS infrastructure. Therefore I don't buy any confusion about who the legit authority is... You talk to the person signing the checks. I understand this implication about some sort of internal coup, but the actions do not seem consistent with that being a serious belief at the time either.
It wasn't his decision to make. His consulting was terminated, he needed to hand over whatever credentials he had and wash his hands of it.
They still don’t seem to be in complete control or understanding of the infrastructure they forcefully took control of.
Seeing that he still has root, which means others may, changing root is the most benevolent thing he can do.
It immediately means he has the only unauthorized access instead an unknown many, and that they’ll now cycle keys like they should have in the first place.
So who should Arko contact? The guy who’s his “boss” just suspended a bunch of access, twice, and emailed contradictory things. Given how sloppy the overall security situation clearly was and continues to be, I’m guessing no one really understands how AWS security works except for Andre anyway.
Of course hindsight is 20/20. The whole debacle is a shame.
So he suspected an attack, but did not contact his employer about it or other team members. No action taken to mitigate the attack or to identify what was going on. Just changed the AWS root account password and nothing else.
Even assuming the very best intentions, I don’t think it unreasonable that Ruby Central found that a little bit suspicious.
Here's the thing: when a corporation terminates you, no matter the situation, you delete all your credentials, apps, everything, wash your hands of everything and never attempt access again. It's nice to say that the corporation should be better at rotating passwords but legally, you need to simply delete everything and move on.
Hence the letter from RC's lawyer to Arko. And a good chance he'll be prosecuted.
For the past 10 years the Ruby community had been co-opted by political activists. Things like COC's and the Contributor Covenant etc. started in the Ruby community. The activists went after many top contributors in the community because of personal political beliefs etc, instead of behavior in the community itself. Some even called for ejecting DHH, the creator of rails, and Matz, the creator of the language, from the community.
When the Overton window finally stopped shifting to the left and started to move right, a lot of people who had remained quiet due to real threats of loss of business, work etc. finally started to speak up. DHH was one of them and has been very outspoken with his beliefs that open source software should be a-political and open to all instead of the political purity tests the activists were pushing.
From what I observed, when I was in involved in the Ruby community, Arko appeared to be a political activist. While there may have been an actual security concern here, my guess is that this had more to do with a desire to not have someone who may have been involved in trying to eject the top creators in the community being a point of failure for key infrastructure for the Ruby ecosystem.
Therefore, "open source software should be a-political and open to all" is by definition both impossible (you cannot have a group without politics) and a political statement (as it is suggesting a decision making process.) Furthermore, don't mistake a conservative position (e.g. everything should stay the same) for an apolitical one.
[1]: For example:
> politics: “who gets what, where, when, and how”—the process for resolving disputes and allocating scarce resources"
https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pa...
I am not sure how OP can spin this as being 'very outspoken with his beliefs that open source software should be a-political and open to all instead of the political purity tests the activists were pushing'...
I've seen a lot of DHH content, and I'd never describe it as radical right wing.
Radical can be defined as a sharp departure from the status quo (DHH is merely suggesting a turn back to the status quo of immigration policy from maybe a couple decades ago) or as something more extreme than the mainstream view. If something is so popular it's the majority opinion, it's not radical by most definitions.
So in his mind, you can be a British citizen born in Britain but not a "native Brit." I don't see how one can reach this conclusion unless you believe non-white people to be incapable of being "native Brits" despite being born and raised in Britain.
Again, would love to see where he advocates for any particular immigration policy. The post pretty explicitly admits to just preferring when London was more white (as evidenced by linking to stats showing London is not less British, simply less white)
I don't share many of his opinions, but nothing in there screams extremist right, sexist or xenophobic.
Everyone is invited to click on the link upthread and form their own opinion!
It's also littered with references to other far-right positions, like defending someone who was tweeting out incitements to violence against trans people - "If a trans-woman is in a female-only space, punch them in the balls"
I think the average person on the left likes to believe they have the position that “all immigration is good”. In reality, they mean all migration by nonwhite people is good (see how they talk about white or near-white people in the US, Canada, Israel). It’s this hypocrisy and obviously racist stance that bugs me.
What makes Muslim migration to Europe “good” but Jewish migration to the stateless land of Israel from 1890-1948 bad? What makes Muslims moving to the US “good” but makes all white people in the US colonizers? Either everybody gets the colonizer notation (foolish imo) or migration is a human right (like it was for the million years before the modern nation-state) and everybody needs to fucking deal with it, stop killing each other and stop condemning people for moving or for the past crimes of people who may be barely related. And if you’re going to migrate: don’t be an asshole to the people there first.
How about xenophobic and sexist?