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Post-mortem of Shai-Hulud attack on November 24th, 2025

52 pointsby makepaniclast Wednesday at 1:22 PM38 commentsview on HN

Comments

healsdatatoday at 10:42 PM

Imagine my surprise that the company that posts "Collaboration sucks" and endorses a YOLO approach to decision making then has a security breach based on misconceptions of a GitHub action that was caught by security tools and could have been proven out via collaboration or a metered approach to decision making.

erikpukinskistoday at 11:00 PM

Does anyone have experience putting their production branches in a separate repo from their development branches?

GitHub makes it very easy to make a pull request from one repo into another.

This would seem to have a lot of benefits: you can have different branch protection rules in the different repos, different secrets.

Would it be a pain in the ass?

For an open source project you could have an open contribution model, but then only allow core maintainers to have write access in the production repo to trigger a release. Or maybe even make it completely private.

hhhtoday at 9:04 PM

I didn’t know what Posthog was before this event but the website is so unusable on Safari on MacOS or iOS for me i’m surprised I stuck through to discover the product.

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flunhattoday at 9:24 PM

Posthog's website design feels like a joke that went a bit too far

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themlytoday at 9:43 PM

Long story short: they messed up the assign-reviewers.yml workflow, allowing external contributors to merge PRs without proper reviews. From this point on, you're fully open to all kinds of bad stuff.

dangoodmanUTtoday at 11:03 PM

The slight side scrolling on mobile, and overriding the link alt-click behavior… why

__dtoday at 10:49 PM

So I saw the headline and for a moment I was very confused: aren’t sand worms fictional?

Pre-coffee, apparently.

mrdosijatoday at 9:05 PM

So it wasn't phishing attack? Wonder how those bot access tokens got stolen.

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KomoDtoday at 9:30 PM

Wow, I hate this website to be honest. So much of the space is taken up by all these "bars" on my already small screen.

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woodruffwtoday at 9:26 PM

This is a great writeup, kudos for the PostHog folks.

Curious: would you be able to make your original exploitable workflow available for analysis? You note that a static analysis tool flagged it as potentially exploitable, but that the finding was suppressed under the belief that it was a false positive. I'm curious if there are additional indicators the tool could have detected that would have reduced the likelihood of premature suppression here.

(I tried to search for it, but couldn't immediately find it. I might be looking in the wrong repository, though.)