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Comment by jms703 | Hacker News Reader

Do they know what the attackers were after? Maybe they were just trying to help fix the availability problems.

This comment reminds me of a joke where the punchline is that a person is so poor that burglars break in to their house and leave money.

Similarly, I could see ransomware groups hacking in and feeling bad for GH so they improve a few things to help them get to at leave nine fives of uptime.

Many years ago there was an attack that went around that used the server’s BMC as an entry point. Thing is, BMCs are universally shit, so as part of the attack, the attackers also fixed a bunch of bugs so their connection could persist. I was working in hardware management at the time, and when we heard about that, we all gave that one a hard think…

It should be in their interest actually, since much of the malware is spread via GitHub.

Just in case you are not aware, a joke loses its fun factor if you explain it.

But they become fun again when someone points that out.

I believe you are explaining very basic things to an LLM.

On hn, a joke increases its fun factor by being over-explained in excruciating detail with several digressions into related jokes and the history and philosophy of joking, and someone ends up showing a site they made with all the possible variations of that joke and something about the scrolljacking css annoys one of the commenters enough that they break in and fix it.

A variation of that joke is used in Zen Buddhism as a teaching story. A famous monk, who lived in voluntary poverty in a mountain hut, wakes up in the middle of the night because a robber had broken in - except the robber couldn't find anything of value. So the monk listened to the rummaging sound for a while, and feeling bad for the robber's family, offers his blanket. The robber is so surprised by the kindness of the monk that he gives up his stealing ways and decides to become a good guy.

A famous monk, who maintained empty website to make a point about Zen, wakes up in the middle of the night because LLM crawler had broken in past captcha -- except the crawler couldn't find anything of value on his website. So the monk listened to the futile rummaging sounds of HDD's head for a while, and feeling bad for the crawler's company, put his lifetime worth of manuscripts on the website. The crawler was so surprised by the kindness of the monk that it started to crawl his website 100 per second, DDoSing it out of existence.

> HDD

poor monk deserves an SSD, it's 2026 after all :(

They weren't telling the joke, they were using it as a reference point. They also didn't explain it, they just gave the punchline without any setup.

Unfortunately on HN people who don't get the joke tend to down vote it, so there's an incentive for pre emptive explanation.

There was a worm that patched vulnerabilities in mikrotik couple of years ago.

This reminds me of a joke my neighbor used to tell:

If catch a burglar in my house, I will ask them what they are doing. If they respond with "I'm searching for money!", I'll suggest "Let's search together, and whatever we find, we split 50/50"

The availibilty problems are caused by incapable managers overloading Azure boxes, code fixes will not help much. Maybe they get into HR and help get them fired. And help rehire the ones who could fix it. But that needs a nation state actor, not just your best hacker group.

No, that is only the cause of some of the uptime issues. Some have clearly been caused by deploying briken code.

The good old "malware patches Windows so that sending spam is stable again".

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