New GitHub Scams
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From Boston, MA
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This will be a bit less refined of a blog post since I wanted to rush to get it out - primarily because it's pretty annoying.
The GitHub scammers/spammers are coming up with some pretty wild techniques to make it incredibly difficult for them to be reported and dealt with.
If you haven't seen (or been on the receiving end of) some of these new spam posts, here's an example of one that popped up in my email inbox the other day:
On first glance - this looks like it could be real! However there's a few things that seem pretty suspicious:
- Email subject includes the usual
[owner/repo]prefix - Beginning of the email says: "...[bot] created an issue..."
- The actual link within the body of the email has a different source than the text of the link (
y-combinator.comvs shownycombinator.com)- I didn't actually click through to the link itself to see if it looks close enough to the actual ycombinator website
the best part is that there's an odd amount of whitespace at the bottom of the email body, and if you keep scrolling down you'll see your GitHub username (and several others) all tagged in the created issue!
