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The RubyGems "Security Incident"
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoRelated: Rubygems.org AWS Root Access Event – September 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45530832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45530832
- mbStavola 1y agoOne of the primary justifications given for the takeover was to secure the gems service and offer trustworthy stewardship. Reading this, I don't really get the sense that the new maintainers are really prepared to deliver on either. That said, I really don't like the hand waving of the HTTP log thing in this post. Yeah sure, company names aren't as sensitive/radioactive as an SSN or an email, but selling usage data isn't exactly a noble endeavor. I don't think anyone comes out of this looking good. Some are worse than others, sure, but this is just a mess from top to bottom.
- plorkyeran 1y agoMy primary takeaway from all of this is that I do not want to be depending on infrastructure run by Ruby Central. Maybe it’ll turn out that the previous status quo was even worse and we just got incredibly lucky that it never exploded, but the people now running things have consistently failed to inspire confidence.
- adamors 1y agoThat is my takeaway as well, this whole saga is a comedy of errors and the butt of the joke is the new RC.
- darkwater 1y ago> That said, I really don't like the hand waving of the HTTP log thing in this post What "hand waving"? André explicitly mentioned he did not have any log or information.
- mbStavola 1y agoNo but he was seeking it, from the email in the RubyCentral article and directly from TFA: > I have no interest in any PII, commercially or otherwise. As my private email published by Ruby Central demonstrates, my entire proposal was based solely on company-level information, with no information about individuals included in any way. Here Andre is downplaying his ask of the logs. Even if Andre didn't get them, the logs were desired. Had Ruby Central acquiesced the logs would've been parsed and sold. Might not be an issue for you but I am frankly not interested in having any data shared or sold like this.
- darkwater 1y agoHonestly, I can't really see what you are reading through the lines here. Are you by any chance involved with RubyGems / RubyCentral? In my case, I'm just a bystander and not even a Ruby developer (but I worked in a Ruby company in the past so I know the ecosystem). EDIT: oh, you might be referring to the RubyCentral statement. I didn't read the original security incident text, so my bad here. Sorry.
- mbStavola 1y agoI am definitely not affiliated with either, moreso my opinion is considerably more negative of the new maintainers (both for the method of takeover and their handling of this incident). Quite frankly, I don't even know why you would even ask if I was. I do not feel like I'm reading between any lines here-- Ruby Central directly showed that André Arko asked for the data to sell in order to cover the on-call fees. Yes, they have reason to smear him and shouldn't be trusted, but André confirms that he asked for the logs. None of that is up for debate, these are just the facts! What we can argue about is 1) whether this is meaningfully different than what RC does already as noted by their ToS and 2) whether or not company names derived from the HTTP logs is sensitive or whatever. It is my position that neither André nor RC should be selling this sort of usage data, regardless of motivation. Personally I think the monetization of such data is bad in general, but I understand not everyone feels the same. It just gives me the ick. EDIT: Immediately after submitting this, I saw that you issued a correction. Bad timing on my part I suppose!
- bigiain 1y agoThey were all spitballing ideas about how to recover from the DHH-driven dropping of corporate sponsorship dollars, and how too keep the support lights on. I think an offer of covering all the 2nd level support costs in return for the right - that Ruby Central's own T&Cs grant - to monetise company usage stats, is a reasonable offer. The "other side's" alternative was to steal ownership and control of a whole bunch of volunteer gem authors work at the behest of a different corporate sponsor who was clearly demonstrating they wanted to be able to not only throw their weight around and force policies and priorities on RubyGems/RubyCentral, but also to make it personal by explicitly calling for long term contributors to be removed entirely on a whim.
- phoronixrly 1y agoI blame DHH for all of this. He needs to step up, walk his words back and mend the damage to the Ruby community he has done. Including chipping in with the funding he cost Rubygems.
- ljm 1y agoEveryone is responsible for their own actions and DHH hasn't made anybody do anything. The reactions to his statements, whether you agree with what he said or not, are entirely voluntary. What it does reveal is the fragility of a community that can seemingly be disrupted because of a single controversial blog post from a guy known to be controversial. This has counter-intuitively elevated DHH's position to that of a lynchpin, accentuating his importance as opposed to pressing him into obscurity. I personally found DHH's take reprehensible and whatever respect I had for the man has all but vanished, but the Ruby community really does like to throw the baby out with the bathwater sometimes.
- phoronixrly 1y agoSo, let me get this straight, you blame Sidekiq (and others!) for pulling their sponsorship, thus throwing the baby (rubygems.org) with the bath water (the reputational damage they'd get from being associated with Ruby Central and DHH)?
- tetha 1y agoMh, one of our security admins recently said something that's very fitting to the discussion: If you are removing an employee from a company, and you have to rely on their personal integrity instead of technical controls to avoid problems, you are doing very basic access control wrong. And if you're doing absolute fundamentals like that wrong, how much is your entire information security worth then? And reading this, and the other disclosure from Ruby Central, they seem to be handling this maintainer/employee offboarding woefully incompetently at really, really basic levels. Obtaining control to secret management and doing a general secret rotation of management secrets isn't an obscure first step.
- psadauskas 1y agoPlus, its not a good look for RubyCentral for trying to smear Andre for it, when it is perfectly acceptable within their own Privacy Policy[1]: > We may share aggregate or de-identified information with third parties for research, marketing, analytics, and other purposes, provided such information does not identify a particular individual. [1]: https://rubycentral.org/privacy-notice/ https://rubycentral.org/privacy-notice/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anon84873628 1y agoIn a comment under the submission for Ruby Central's post, I said Arko changing the AWS password was an inexcusable ethical violation. This context does slightly soften my view, especially the part about multiple 1Password accounts being in play. However there is a big thing still missing to me... Why would Arko not immediately notify RC that he had changed the password due to these concerns? If it was really a noble good faith action by the assigned on-call, giving a heads up to the remaining stakeholders would be the obligatory next step, no? According to RC's timeline, the password reset happened on September 19, but Arko did not disclose the issue to RC until September 30. From what I can tell, he has not refuted that timeline or explained the gap.
- bigiain 1y agoTo me it looks like he wasn't sure who was trustworthy at the time. "The erratic and contradictory communication supplied by Marty Haught, and the complete silence from Shan and the board, made it impossible to tell exactly who had been authorized to take what actions. As this situation occurred, I was the primary on-call. My contractual, paid responsibility to Ruby Central was to defend the RubyGems.org service against potential threats. " and "Given Marty’s claims, the sudden permission deletions made no sense. Worried about the possibility of hacked accounts or some sort of social engineering, I took action as the primary on-call engineer to lock down the AWS account and prevent any actions by possible attackers." and "Within a couple of days, Ruby Central made an (unsigned) public statement, and various board members agreed to talk directly to maintainers. At that point, I realized that what I thought might have been a malicious takeover was both legitimate and deliberate, and Marty would never “fix the permissions structure”, or “follow up more” as he said. Once I understood the situation, I backed off to let Ruby Central take care of their “security audit”. I left all accounts in a state where they could recover access." > According to RC's timeline, the password reset happened on September 19, but Arko did not disclose the issue to RC until September 30. The password reset happened on September 19, and "within a few days" he realised it was an intentional/malicious takeover, and he walked away knowing they had the means to recover their own access - no longer his monkeys, no longer his circus. The 30 Sep date was when he was asked by someone if he still had access, and he discovered he did, and let them know immediately. That all seems way more likely to be true and feels more plausible than anything Ruby Central has published over the last month or so...
- mikeg8 1y agoRuby central looks so incompetent it’s not even funny. Bummer all around.
- wgjordan 1y agoI think the biggest missing piece in the opposing accounts of this incident is how exactly the production-access removal was communicated. There's a huge gap between how the two posts are framing the clarity of the communications that happened on Sept 18: > September 18 2025 18:40 UTC: Ruby Central notifies Mr. Arko, via email, of the board’s decision to remove his RubyGems.org production access, and the termination of his on-call services. > Marty Haught sent an email to the team within minutes, at 12:47pm PDT [19:47 UTC?], saying he was (direct quote) “terribly sorry” and “I messed up”. [...] the complete silence from Shan and the board, made it impossible to tell exactly who had been authorized to take what actions. As this situation occurred, I was the primary on-call. André also mentioned that he disclosed further remaining production access a few days ago, on Oct 5. Looking forward to Ruby Central's followup post-incident review for this subsequent incident, which they failed to address or mention at all in their initial publication.
- emmelaich 1y agoSo weird that Marty is using corporate speak to someone who I presume he's been working with for up to ten years. All of them really, not just Marty H.
- skywhopper 1y agoYeah, given that RC was willing to publish an email from Arko about an unrelated topic in their “security incident review”, it’s unfortunate they aren’t publishing how the access suspension was actually communicated to folks. Sounds like it was sudden enough and weird enough that Arko’s actions in response of locking down the AWS account were totally justified.
- ethagnawl 1y agoWhile I can't imagine how sad, stressful and confusing this all is for the people directly involved, it's also been hard to watch from the outside. For the past few years (decade, really) the community has been Ruby's biggest asset and seeing it torn apart like this is tragic.
- lgleason 1y agoReading the tea leaves, I think this incident may have more to do with politics than it being a real incident per se. For the past 10 years the Ruby community had been co-opted by political activists. Things like COC's and the Contributor Covenant etc. started in the Ruby community. The activists went after many top contributors in the community because of personal political beliefs etc, instead of behavior in the community itself. Some even called for ejecting DHH, the creator of rails, and Matz, the creator of the language, from the community. When the Overton window finally stopped shifting to the left and started to move right, a lot of people who had remained quiet due to real threats of loss of business, work etc. finally started to speak up. DHH was one of them and has been very outspoken with his beliefs that open source software should be a-political and open to all instead of the political purity tests the activists were pushing. From what I observed, when I was in involved in the Ruby community, Arko appeared to be a political activist. While there may have been an actual security concern here, my guess is that this had more to do with a desire to not have someone who may have been involved in trying to eject the top creators in the community being a point of failure for key infrastructure for the Ruby ecosystem.
- watwut 1y agoDHH is political activist, hardcore radical one. Always was. It is completely absurd how radical right wing gets labeled "apolitical" in these takes.
- mikl 1y ago> I took action as the primary on-call engineer to lock down the AWS account and prevent any actions by possible attackers. So he suspected an attack, but did not contact his employer about it or other team members. No action taken to mitigate the attack or to identify what was going on. Just changed the AWS root account password and nothing else. Even assuming the very best intentions, I don’t think it unreasonable that Ruby Central found that a little bit suspicious.
- anon84873628 1y agoThis is the part that strains my belief as well. If you're really the concerned responsible professional working for the greater good of the community, then pick up the (metaphorical) phone ASAP and sort it out, regardless of how pissed off and insulted you are by the boss's incompetence.
- dismalaf 1y agoAndre Arko seems to be trying to reframe this by concern trolling and appealing to people's sense of community. Here's the thing: when a corporation terminates you, no matter the situation, you delete all your credentials, apps, everything, wash your hands of everything and never attempt access again. It's nice to say that the corporation should be better at rotating passwords but legally, you need to simply delete everything and move on. Hence the letter from RC's lawyer to Arko. And a good chance he'll be prosecuted.
- shivenigma 1y agoIf you consider the timing of this, there were supply chain attacks happened in other ecosystems and changing the root password seems to be the right approach and it feels justified to me.