GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks | Hacker News Reader

GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks

successfulsoftware.net

279 pointshermitcrab119 comments

Author of the post here. Github finally took the offending page down approximately 10 minutes after the post appeared on the front page of HN. Total coincidence. I'm sure!

Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.

And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.

It might not be a willingness issue as much as a bandwidth issue.

unwilling to provide proper support?

Just seems like a silly rational response to the same problem.

Yes,evidently bandwidth from HN unblocks takedown requests of malicious content.

Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies. I guarantee you that once an issue hits the HN front page, even engineers who might have totally different talks will get involved. (Never worked at GH or have talked to anyone there in years but this is how everything works pretty much everywhere)

The public shaming will continue until the internal incentives improve. Make sure to drop that HN thread link into the internal task tracker y'all. Don't forget to report to journalists if the severity warrants it (Brian Krebs, 404media, etc).

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."

> Prioritization and escalation exists in most companies.

Yes, indeed public awareness of a problem affects how an issue is reprioritized. Some companies even employ web scrapers to do sentiment analysis at each release, and visible issues do get bumped to high priority.

It's amusing how some people in this thread try to pretend this doesn't happen, and make these bold assertions with a straight face in replies to people who were in actual meetings where issues were escalated because of this.

Good thing HN provided them some bandwidth to do their jobs.

Bandwidth can be bought with money, of which Microsoft made an extra $133.7 billion this year.

Sounds like they can afford elite customer support.

We know that coding agents have been pushing GH to its limits. Scaling is hard - especially staff. Maybe they aren't trying to scale support but I think it's reasonable to give them the benefit of doubt here, given what we know publicly

That’s a self-inflicted issue they should have properly planned for.

You’re saying this is a problem money can’t solve?

There’s no need for benefit of the doubt when it comes to the level of support provided by tech companies.

Bad support by tech companies is a conscious profit-preserving choice.

Microsoft is not some plucky upstart company with 12 employees and an unexpectedly popular product. We do not, in fact, need to give them the benefit of the doubt here.

From having worked at abd four startups and massive companies, the company being massive actually might make some things harder.

Like, philosophically? Because companies on Microsoft's scale can move heaven and earth to accomplish whatever they please regardless of difficulty. If it's difficult that just means it costs more money. Microsoft is planning to put ML infrastructure in space, but you're saying that building a support org, which Microsoft is very familiar with, is too hard because they're so big?

They aren't trying to scale support. If anything, they are trying to throw AI at the problem. The support team is understaffed and overwhelmed.

Having "hackers" on this site giving the benefit of doubt to companies clearing hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year will never cease to stop being ironic to me...

On the site run by a VC firm? Why is that a shock? Besides, hacker does not mean being a kneejerking reactionary against corporations.

I don't think you understand the website if you think this is some revelation. The people here are social climbing demons who will earn their reward in hell. But the term hackers is apt, they are hacks and are hacking their soul to pieces. If only you or I had courage to actually do something other than to make snide remarks at their expense. Introspection is almost as bad as ambition.

This is one of the things I dislike the most about large tech companies. They get way more customers than they can adequately provide support/moderation for and either offer no support or shitty automated support. Then when something falls through the cracks people always go "what do you expect them to do, hire enough people?" Yeah I do!

Never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft is elite.

They have to dump all that free cash into data centers, sorry

I have for a long time said that the way to regulate these huge companies would be to have government-mandated SLOs for live support.

For example (simplified), if a user makes a call, a person with sufficient privileges to handle 90% of the cases should answer on the other end within 2 minutes. If the case cannot be handled, the higher-up with privileges to handle 99% of the cases should be reached within 5 minutes. And to be fair, it should be mandated for all companies, not only FAANG-like.

But a company like Meta (for example) with a billion customers would then have to decide whether they want to work on quality improvements for their services or whether they would like to hire a million technical support staff.

If users value support so much, you should start a competitor with excellent support. I suspect though that very few users are willing to pay the additional cost.

Once in a while support is truly needed around the less frequently used paths in the system but impossible to reach. Most users don't need it, but those comparatively few that do really value it. Problem is, these companies are so entrenched, in some cases there is literally nowhere else to go.

Abuse reports aren't even done by users. That's a classical externality.

> Moral of the story. If you want even the most basic level of support from Github, you need to get on the front page of HN first.

This also works for Google support.

> And it seems they are able to do things very quickly, when they want to. Bastards.

I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

It was already a problem before agents could automatically perform these actions.

And it’s not something you can really automate on their end either. At least not the judgement call on the removal. Imagine if there was a fully automated process and it inadvertently took down a legit project.

> I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.

Can you provide evidence of these claims?

I mean we are in the thread of evidence right now?

GitHub support is full of amazing, hard working people.

It is also comically understaffed. This is not because they can't find people to work - it's not given the budget necessary.

They might be amazing and hard working, but that doesn’t free them from the yoke of policy and script

I had several small requests for moderation (deleting and banning spammers posting spam/crypto scam issues/PRs in my repos and ones I contribute to) answered within a day earlier this year after more than a decade of never needing to request moderation. I'm not defending GH here as it's obviously unacceptable that the OP's issue took this long, but they definitely do or at least did have mods. I would guess they need a lot more of them if something this serious went unaddressed, or maybe the ones I interacted with are now gone and have not been backfilled.

I mean.. for better or worse, this is how corporate America works. Hiring to solve a problem that's not costing them money (and solving it doesn't make money) is probably not going to happen, especially with the current state of the economy. They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works.

how does anyone expect to solve AI alignment when we can't even solve corporate alignment

Life sure ain't perfect.. not much you can do about that sometimes.

If we have no way to strike back, they will simply suck every drop of blood out the way you use every part of the buffalo. There is no way to escape Microsoft when they just buy everything and turn it into part of their garbage moat.

> They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works

Where does this myth come from, and how does it survive? It's either an excuse for parasitic corporatism, or an expression of learned helplessness. Nobody has been successfully sued for prioritizing the long-term health and reputation of a company over self-starving quarterly profit.

Is there a perverse incentive toward the latter anyway? Yes. But it mostly serves current leadership, who are evaluated and paid on short horizons, at the expense of the long-term investors who own most of the equity.

Definitely not a myth, friend. Read this article from Harvard Business School: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/fiduciary-duty-to-investors

"Accepting funding from investors puts you in a fiduciary role in which you’re responsible for managing their money and putting their needs above your own"

Where on that page is there anything to indicate that hiring more QA or mods would be so bad as to be considered a breach of fiduciary duty? That seems like a pretty big exaggeration, at best.

This behavior is a matter of incentives, not obligations. No need to apologize for them.

"Fiduciary duty" does not mean "pursue profit to the exclusion of all other considerations".

The reality is "it's complicated". But the strongest form of this - that "companies must maximize profits over ALL over concerns NO MATTER WHAT" is basically a myth. See:

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

https://www.legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-co...

https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/archives/56/5/end-sharehol...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value

So yeah, "fiduciary duty" is a real thing, but that's not quite the same thing as saying that every single decision has to be focused on nothing but profit maximization.

So you think making bad business decisions is holding up to fiduciary duty? You can't throw money at every problem that you'd like to solve, calling that malice is silly was the point I was trying to make.

Neglecting all other ethical duties beside profits is so close to malice it takes ...an, ah, expert, to tell you the differences and how important they are.

And this neglecting all duties besides profits thing is real, it is institutionalized by decisions of investors, by managers hired by investors, by regulators "captured" by investors and so-forth. It is the norm. But that doesn't it's a legal or ethical that a given manager or employee has, at least not currently.

Paying staff to avoid distributing literal malware on your platform is not a bad business decision. And even if it was - yes, bad business decisions are within the scope of fiduciary duty. Have you ever seen someone successfully sued under this clause for making a bad business decision, in your life? Fiduciary duty is more like, you can't take the money and run or pay your nephew a $10,000,000 salary to play ping pong in the office. As long as you're not doing something clearly, intentionally harmful to the business and investors, you're clear.

They are paying people to do that. What I said was that hiring more probably won't happen in this economy.

> So you think making bad business decisions is holding up to fiduciary duty?

I didn't say anything remotely like that, so I'm going to assume you're not trying to have a good faith discussion here, and decline to participate any further. Have a nice day.

You're the one jumping all over what I said, I'm trying to explain what I said since you seem to have such a problem with it. Wow.

Nothing in that article says you're obligated to maximize profit, and you're not:

> To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Executives are free to pursue near-term profit at the expense of everything else if they choose, and the shareholders are free to replace them if they don't. That's a choice by those executives or shareholders though, not an obligation.

I said it's their biggest priority, not their only priority... solving a problem that doesn't cost money and the solution doesn't make money is bottom of the barrel. Come on guys, be real.

FWIW I totally agree with that. What I (and several others) disagree with is the idea that the concept of fiduciary duty confers an obligation to pursue profit at the expense of all else.

Is there an incentive to do that? Yes, or at least it's obviously quite possible. But is there an obligation? No.

Relative to the comment you were responding to, it sounded like you were defending the idea that an obligation exists.

The distinction matters because if such an obligation did exist it would effectively excuse a lot of bad behavior.

You used the word "obligation", not "priority". That's simply not correct, and it transfers responsibility from the people making these decisions to whatever nebulous system would enforce that "obligation".

If you look at the case law for fiduciary responsibility, then you'll find that executives have a strong obligation against self-dealing (decisions that clearly benefit them at the expense of the shareholder), but not much else. The "business judgment rule" makes it generally lawful for executives to make decisions that you, the shareholders, the judge, or anyone else might consider to be bad business judgment. It couldn't really be otherwise, since the difference between wasteful spending and a wise investment in the company's reputation might be unclear even decades later.

If shareholders disagree with an executive's business judgment, then their remedy is to fire that executive. That remedy has nothing specific to "making money"--the shareholders are just as free to fire a CEO for excessive attention to profit as insufficient.

You are nitpicking over semantics in a way that provides no value. For example, you have an obligation to pay your bills, otherwise bad things happen. There's nothing wrong with my choice of words.

I am legally obligated to pay my bills. If I don't, then my creditor can sue me and I will lose. If I still refuse to pay, then the state will enforce the court's judgment, if necessary with tasers and guns (like by physically seizing my property, or by locking me up for civil contempt if I try to conceal my property).

You linked an article about fiduciary responsibility, and that's also a legal obligation. If I'm an executive and I route contracts to a vendor that I own for personal gain, then the shareholders can sue me and I will lose. The state will likewise enforce that judgment, if necessary with physical force.

If I'm an executive and I choose to spend too much money (in someone's opinion) auditing a git hosting site for malware, then the possibility that I'll get sued for that and lose is zero. That's the "business judgment rule", which is a legal term of art that you can search. The shareholders might fire me, but only in the same way they could fire me for anything.

The financial incentives are obviously as you say, but the difference between "things I do because the state will physically punish me if I don't" and "things I do because I want a high-paying job" is valuable to me. I could probably make more money than I do now if I worked for a payday lender or an online casino, but I don't think that obligates me to do so.

many readers here have not experienced a standard of customer support that was common decades ago. Google in particular created a new standard for ignoring the customer on a large scale, in my own experiences. Secondly, the customer paid money to a company for service, while an emergent business form does not take money from the customer directly, blurring the definition of customer.

I strongly agree that failure to stand for consumer rights is both learned helplessness and an apologist cooperator psychology. CA Voter here.

> They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors

"Obligation" is the wrong word. Should be "incentive".

It is a problem they could solve if they want to. They have billions of profits per quarter.

They just don't want to. Not malicious, just ignorant and disrespectful of their users.

I’m sure they are swamped with such requests

Then maybe they should be growing their customer support capacity along with their business. It drives me crazy how big companies have normalized cutting those departments down to anemic proportions. Especially those where you're a paying customer.

Remember when Google lost a lawsuit for defaming a business in their AI search results?

>I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

It's malice from whoever is responsible for under-staffing. It's also malice to prioritize the squeaky wheel for optics; it's intentional to reduce the spread of the knowledge of how unresponsive they are.

YouTube already does it autonomously with seemingly no legal consequences for them because you agree to it in their tos

YouTube also totally fails to remove obvious fraud videos, even ones they mark verified. (If someone takes over a verified channel and renames it, they keep the verified flag). -- also with no legal consequences.

> I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.

Handling these requests at whatever scale they operate is their responsibility.

Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to take on all of their customers.

Unfortunately this is very true. It often takes someone pretty high up on the food chain to see it on HN, X, or get an email/LinkedIn message asking about something for it to become a priority.

I don't see that changing for any of the large companies unfortunately, anytime soon.

Just send DMCA if you want their attention, they act harshly and quickly. Even when it's false one.

https://marksgray.com/intellectual-property-law/how-fraudule...

Fraud

Do the ends justify the means?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

What? This is what the DMCA was designed for. How would it be fraud?

Describes pretty much any of the big companies. For example, I have seen numerous times people got their account locked on Google, or their app stuck in limbo at Apple, and then after post becomes viral all problems get solved.

Apple in particular is mocked because they explicitly say (used to say?) “going to the press doesn’t help”, but they’ve shown time and again that it’s the most effective way to get them to take action.

Same goes for all companies bigger than a startup. The first line of support is AI, the second line is clueless, and the third level is powerless. HN is the only way to reach a human with both ability and willingness to help

This was not my experience at all. Someone on the bitchat android commented with a virus, reported it and was taken down 2 hours later

They're generally extremely quick about this if you ping ~anyone on the security team with the offending url and a link to the real repo. There is a long ongoing game of cat & mouse against malware in repackaged things like first party windows utilities to leverage the signed binaries.

>if you ping ~anyone on the security team

And how I am supposed to know who they are or how to reach them?

Hacker News saves the day once again!

> need to get on the front page of HN

> ping ~anyone on the security team

> HN provided them some bandwidth

> also works for Google support

> answered within a day earlier this year

> no reaction otherwise. It's still online.

> app stuck in limbo at Apple

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

> given what we know publicly

> thread of evidence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

For this specific case, a DMCA would have gotten you a much faster take down. As far as I can tell it's automated. Sure, they could appeal it but then the malware nature of it would be in the crosshairs of the reviewer.

Not excusing their slow response, though.

How did you report this to GitHub? Your post shows an automated response from GitHub support. Did you follow GitHub's documented instructions on reporting abuse? https://docs.github.com/en/communities/maintaining-your-safe...

what is surprising that's most big companies, post on social media and they start caring. probably because they get a bunch of spam in their reports and it's hard to filter through.

Love the conclusion at the end, because it summarizes GitHub leadership pretty well.

In violation of their own name-squatting policy, Github has refused to rename or remove an account that is squatting my legal name even after I sent them a scan of my ID proving that it is my legal name.

Unfortunately drawing attention to it would likely invoke the Streissand effect and be counter productive so I can only wait until the frabjous day that github goes dark at last.

If GitHub staff is still reading this thread, maybe you can take down https://screenmemory.github.io/ as well. I reported it 4 weeks ago, ticket ID 4703161

Please give GitHub some slack, just check out the massive number of copilot changes they've had to release over the last 3 weeks (https://github.blog/changelog/). There's clearly little time left for security, maintenance, or reliability work.

I recently found "free" version of Lossless Scaling on GitHub. The release installer is definitely malware. It took GitHub 3 days to shutdown malware distribution. Category of my ticket was malware report, not copyright infringe

Author here. I initially reported it as an imitation. A few days later I added evidence that it was malware.

They’re presumably too busy with keeping availability above nine sixes

Three weeks? Try almost three years:

https://lowendbox.com/blog/will-github-ever-remove-this-null...

Lack of moderation is an issue everywhere, because there are few consequences for the platforms.

Booking.com kept a clearly fraudulent listing (images clearly stolen from another Booking.com listing with mirroring + some filters) fully online for at least two days (I got distracted and stopped taking daily screenshots after that). I just got a response that they've taken it down almost 10 days after I had initially reported it (although I think they marked it as not bookable some time before that).

Not exactly the same, but I've noticed a pretty sizable uptick in the number of spam/scam PR comments being left on GitHub (and a longer delay before they're removed after report).

Not the worst thing in the world, they're easy to spot, but I'd like to see GitHub invest more time in protecting their users from falling victim to these bad actors.

In the future just issue a DMCA takedown right away for cases like this, IMO.

These kinds of imitation attacks seem to be getting more common. It’s not just random malware anymore — some of them are getting surprisingly polished and even use the real product name and logo. Interesting (and a bit sad) how visibility on HN seems to speed things up on GitHub’s side.

I found a page that serving e-books I've purchased on github. It is a bit bad feeling

grindr has been dishing out popup virus and phishing ads for two years and multiple support requests to Google play and Grindr support are like it's a third party ad provider

If they were using your logo, you could have sent a DMCA takedown notice. That would have likely gotten a faster, more serious response.

Welcome to the club!

There's an impersonation profile of me on Github (username happyhannob). I've reported it a while ago, received the same automated message, and no reaction otherwise. It's still online.

I guess you can't expect basic fraud prevention from a company currently building the future with AI...

What do you know. Apple’s “never run to the media it never helps anything” rule works just as well with GitHub.

Seems like they don't even care

why would anyone host commercial binary software on github or any other third party domain?

Pirates and crackers generally don't host stuff on their own domains. They don't want to pay for the bandwidth and they don't want to be traced.

I think they’re alluding to OP not hosting their own downloads.

I am the OP. I host my own downloads on my own domain and nowhere else. Only the malicious imitation is hosted on Github.

If it's your software send a DMCA. They have a legally required timeframe to process those. If it's open source, however, then you don't have any valid DMCA claim.

Code can be open source while the name and logos are copyrighted and still enforceable via DMCA

Which project copyrighted its name and logo?

Logo? Every single one. All creative works automatically get copyright by default.

Now, projects might choose to license their logo permissively, but that's an active choice.

You're thinking of trademarks. Different body of law.

EDIT: e.g. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/

Logos can be part of both. A sufficiently unique logo (e.g. not just the name in Times New Roman) is absolutely copyrighted and an image of it cannot be distributed/reproduced without authorization unless fair use, which the malware project is not.

You're correct I was overly broad about the actual name use being DMCA-able though.

You can have copyright open source code, which is what allows open source licenses to enforce their terms. Open source doesn't mean "free to do whatever you want". There are very restrictive open source licenses, and you can deviate from the common open source licenses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright

That’s not how open source works.

Open source code is still copyrighted. What the license defines is rights that people have in distributing that code. If an unofficial repository is using open source code to ship malware, and the license that software had didn’t allow that, then the unofficial repository is still breaking copyright law despite the code being open source.

Also open source license doesn't grant use of trademarks, but I'm not sure that means DMCA applies.

There's no open source license that prohibits derivative works that are malware.

i think it's in the spirit of it, which is enough for a DMCA lol

Um no, you have to send it about an actual copyright violation, not just because you don't like something.

It's not illegal to send an incorrect one by mistake but GitHub probably won't process it. It's illegal to send an incorrect one intentionally. Now that it's been pointed out to you that making malware isn't a copyright violation, it's intentional if you send a DMCA anyway.

I see OP edited their post claiming getting to HN's front helped.

I think the likelihood GitHub did something within 10 minutes of a post appearing on HN's front page is approximately zero.

Nobody in GitHub Trust & Safety is sat there watching HN.

An executive or communications professional who might have heard it got on HN, or seen it appear in a tool monitoring Microsoft and GitHub's mentions across the internet, and who then flagged the post, Trust & Safety would probably spend *more than 10 minutes* noticing the email or Teams message, then trying to find the right ticket internally. Then after locating the ticket you still have to investigate the facts, discuss, and click buttons to ban/delete the user.

It's (much) more likely this sat in a queue until someone got to it and the timing of it being on HN is a complete coincidence.

It's a hell of a coincidence.

It’s not a coincidence if they had already found the problem, wrote up the solution, primed it for action, and then it sat in some “management queue” for essentially forever, until someone called someone with a go.

I think you wildly underestimate how much more empowered the people monitoring social media escalations are versus the standard front-line support. In a clear-cut case like this I can absolutely imagine someone getting pinged and pressing the 'kill bad thing' button immediately after the post hitting the front page, because I've seen this happen many times.

"Nobody in GitHub Trust & Safety is sat there watching HN"

Please, any competent software dev business has eyes on this page on an hourly basis.

I'm in aerospace and we're crawling on this site, all the way at the top levels.

the timing of it being on HN is a complete coincidence.

The lengths people will go to "never attribute to malice..." are pretty impressive in these days of baldly stated or visible malice from the top.

The last decade has taken the edge off Hanlon's razor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com