Codeberg: Spam and DoS attacks on non-commercial development platform
Masses of spam messages, overflowing email inboxes and clogged internet lines: Anonymous attacks plague the non-profit Github alternative.
Attackers are working their way through a mountain of code and trying to paralyze the open platform.
(Image: Erstellt durch KI mit Bing Designer / cku)
The non-profit software development platform Codeberg has been at the center of various attacks for days. The voluntary initiators of the project suspect a political motivation behind hate messages, spam and dDoS.
A few days ago, around February 10, the attacks against Codeberg e.V. began with spam campaigns against individual projects on the platform. Their bug trackers, for example, were flooded with nonsensical error messages. In addition, the email accounts of association members were filled with abusive newsletter registrations.
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Racist messages in the mailbox
On the morning of February 12, the next step followed: the unknown attackers created thousands of issues (i.e., error messages) with a vulgar racist term in the title, linked user accounts there and thus generated mass email notifications. The troublemakers changed their approach several times to escape the countermeasures taken by Codeberg in the meantime.
Since midday on February 13, a volumetric denial-of-service attack has been clogging up the club's internet connection and causing repeated connection problems.
No user data stolen
In their blog entry (archive link), the Codeberg makers explain that no personal data of users or repository administrators was tapped. Although masses of spam emails with offensive content were sent to members of the platform via a notification function, the attackers did not have access to the servers or users' email addresses. A Codeberg spokesperson emphasized this once again to heise security.
Codeberg was launched as a European alternative to the major software development platforms such as GitHub or GItlab and is based on Forgejo, a fork of Gitea. The association is financed by donations.
(cku)
