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Ghrc.io appears to be malicious

Ghrc.io appears to be malicious

43 comments

·August 24, 2025

nicce

GitHub Container registry does not even support fine-grained tokens, instead it uses classic ones [1], which makes this even more dangerous.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/packages/working-with-a-github-pa...

Edit: most relevant issues?

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/38467

https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/558

thaeli

Are there any additional mitigations folks are using for this? This issue is the only reason we can’t turn classic PATs off entirely.

Short lifetime mandatory reauth to enterprise SSO seems to be the best available, but it’s inconvenient for the single Classic PAT we actually need.

echelon

Someone near a computer that is feeling generous should buy up all the typo'd domain names and hand them over to Microsoft.

Microsoft should rename the registry. This is a horrible name. I know I've typo'd it before.

jsheard

Microsoft is paying top dollar for MarkMonitor, aren't they supposed to proactively register obvious typos so this kind of thing doesn't happen to their clients?

VoidWhisperer

My guess is that MarkMonitor is mainly used for their brand-relevant domains (microsoft, office 365, github (main site), etc), as opposed to one that a small subset of a small subset of their users of one service will use - I would imagine that microsoft likely owns hundreds of domain names and doesn't pay MarkMonitor to monitor every single one

TheDong

Good luck with that.

People over in this github-actions issue are struggling to get github's attention for a 1-line fix to stop hanging jobs forever https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...

That bug is incredibly dumb and obvious. There's been a PR to fix it for over a year with no attention.

I bet there's not a dedicated "github domain names" team, it's probably part of some overworked platform or infrastructure team, and there's no chance in hell any email you send to microsoft or github will end up with that team ever.

You won't have anyone to transfer the names to, you'll just be holding them and paying for them forever.

The best thing you can do if you want to fix this is:

1. Don't make typos.

2. Email github and tell them to reserve typosquat domains, and know it will get ignored, or _maybe_ added to a backlog and ignored for at least the next 15 years

3. Don't make typos.

4. Don't use ghcr for anything, and always mirror public ghcr.io packages using a "bot" github account with only permissions to public repositories to minimize blast radius.

Actually, the best bet to get this fixed is to wait for Microsoft to provide "Email Github Copilot support", hope that they hooked it up so the AI is capable of making purchase decisions, and convince it to purchase about 6000 domain names that might be typoes for security reasons.

worldsayshi

> Don't use ghcr for anything

What is the alternative for small budget private code projects?

Atreiden

Fairly compelling attack vector because it took several readings for me to even see the problem with the domain.

JdeBP

You and many others. Including people who retry multiple times, and even reboot their machines.

* https://stackoverflow.com/a/66985424/340790 (Spot the answerer's account name!)

* https://forums.docker.com/t/docker-unable-to-push-to-ghrc-io...

arjvik

Took the article pointing out that the c and r were transposed for me to even notice there was a problem!

SoftTalker

Yep this is the sort of typo error I make probably 10 times a day.

javchz

What it's funny it's that because tokenization there is a non zero chance a LLM audit may not see anything wrong here, similar to the strawberry problem.

echelon

The problem here is GitHub's terrible domain name.

The container registry has a horrible name.

Gigachad

Why does it seem companies hate subdomains so much? Why is this not just registary.github.com or something? It's like they are trying to get people to fall for phishing by creating so many random domains.

dcrazy

It’s best security practice to host user-generated content on a separate domain to opt into browsers’ cross-domain security policies. Hence ghcr.io, githubusercontent.com, fbimg.com, etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/lg9xnm/why_do_some_...

JdeBP

Interestingly, the GitHub doco says outright that it superseded docker.pkg.github.com. ; so it was a conscious choice to go with this domain naming scheme instead of that one.

* https://docs.github.com/en/packages/working-with-a-github-pa...

cyral

I've noticed this too. Why does amazon have aboutamazon.com and Google have developers.googleblog.com? They literally have their own .google TLD but still choose this weird domain.

Same with local governments. They love something really random like <countyname>proptaxpayment.org instead of treasurer.<countyname>.gov. It's exactly the kind of domain you are told to watch out for, but actually legit.

zx8080

Probably, it's cool, and honored inside an org to operate a separate domain service vs go ask for a permission for a subdomain to another team.

rconti

insecurity through obscurity

usr1106

One reason why you should never think or say ghcr, but always github container register, even if that is longer. You should have enough time for not getting trapped.

Root cause a stupid FLA of course. For several months I thought it means Google whatever register.

_def

I couldn't find anything useful - what is a FLA?

buzer

Four Letter Acronym probably. https://slang.net/meaning/fla

cperciva

FLA is an unusual way of writing XTLA (Extended Three Letter Acronym).

gruez

whois says it's registered by dynadot, so it's probably worth contacting their abuse email: abuse@dynadot.com

aussieguy1234

There are alot of open source projects using this domain https://github.com/search?q=ghrc.io&type=code

notsahil

GitHub should a have tool internally to create bulk and send it as a fix

null

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aussieguy1234

they probably do, they already have one that identified credentials posted to github repos by accident.

lathiat

That's a fairly impressively sized list.

engcoach

Is the danger here token replay? It's using Bearer tokens, so it's not sending a password over:

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Aut...>

Threats section for Bearer tokens: <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6750#section-5.2>

Does OAuth reuse tokens across domains? If not, doesn't this just mean it is requesting an auth token for ghrc (the "fake" domain) but it can't access any auth tokens for ghcr (the real domain)?

bmitch3020

Blog author (and OCI maintainer) here. The request to get a bearer token sends the password or PAT using the basic auth header, base64 encoded, but otherwise clear-text. That's the request the www-authenticate header is triggering. Once the token is received, the registry uses that to verify access, and that eventually expires. But the attacker isn't getting the token, they are requesting the credentials that would be used to acquire a bearer auth token.

null

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a1o

Damn, this can pick a typo from a CI job and do mean things.

TZubiri

Reminder not to use goofy TLDs, being cute is not worth it when compared to security. There's no guarantees that the process for taking down a malicious domain will be as smooth as a .com.

I'd rather deal with US verisign rather than the British Indian Ocean territory or colombia or anguila

bragr

The .io TLD is administered by Afilias which is an American corporation.

nicce

Afilias was sold to Ethos Capital and the whole domain is a mess:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io