The US state of Washington says a miscreant was able to access the system it uses to track the manufacturing and sale of marijuana.

The Evergreen State’s Liquor and Cannabis Board – a job that sounds way cooler than it actually is – yesterday admitted that last weekend someone was able to exploit a vulnerability in one of its machines to access Leaf Data Systems, which Washington uses to keep records on the movement of Mary Jane.

Described as a “seed to sale” tracing process, the Leaf system is intended as a way for the board to keep track on the movement of marijuana from growers and suppliers. Growers and merchants upload information including planned shipments and movements of crops between various points in the “chain of custody” as the pot moves from farms to wholesalers and eventually shops.

Earlier this week, Washington was hit with a pot shortage after the Leaf Data System went down with what was at the time thought to be a “glitch” that had left shops unable to take in new shipments.

On Thursday, the board revealed that the “glitch” was in fact the aftermath of a hacker intrusion, and that someone had been able to obtain a copy of the database that tracked shipments.

“There are indications an intruder downloaded a copy of the traceability database and took action that caused issues with inventory transfers for some users,” the board said.

“We believe this was the root cause of the transfer/manifest issue experienced between Saturday and Monday.”

The stolen database contained information on shipments set to take place between February 1 and 4 of 2018, including route manifest information, vehicle identification and, license plate number. Only the manifest data is considered sensitive, as the other records are public information.

Source: You dopes! US state’s pot dealer database pwned after security goes up in smoke • The Register

I am very curious if any dope trucks got robbed in that period.

The individual identifying himself as Jim Teeuwen, who maintained GitHub repository for a tool called go-bindata for embedded data in Go binaries, recently deleted his GitHub account, taking with it a resource that other Go developers had included in their projects.

The incident echoes the more widely noted 2016 disappearance of around 250 modules maintained by developer Azer Koçulu from the NPM repository. The deletion of one of these modules, left-pad, broke thousands of Node.js packages that incorporated it and prompted NPM to take the unprecedented step of restoring or “un-un-publishing” the code.

Earlier this week, an unidentified developer, whose Go project stopped functioning as a result of the closure of the jteeuwen account, opened a new GitHub account under the abandoned name and repopulated it with a forked version of the go-bindata package as a workaround to re-enable the broken project.

In a post on that account, Franklin Yu, a Boston-area software engineer in the US, said he was a friend of the person who recreated the account and explained that the repo had been resurrected to fix a private project.

“The current owner had no way to directly redirect the repo, so he made such work-around so that he could safely go home without being blamed by his supervisor,” he explained. “And of course, hoped this would also save someone else trapped in similar situation.”
[…]
The security implications of allowing reuse of abandoned names are particularly evident in the domain industry, where expired domains regularly get re-registered by spammers hoping to benefit from whatever trust and traffic the previous owner had accrued.

Developers themselves bear some measure of responsibility for relying on code they can’t control and can’t verify.

But Donat, in a phone interview with The Register, suggested that’s not realistic. “You could argue it’s all down to the developer,” he said. “But the fact of the matter is this is how GitHub is now being used, as a package repository, whether it’s meant to be or not.”

Donat argued that GitHub should address the issue, noting that it would not be difficult to revive an abandoned account name and use it to distribute malware.

Source: You can resurrect any deleted GitHub account name. And this is why we have trust issues • The Register

Personally I don’t think the onus here is on GitHub. If you delete a username, it becomes free. The problem is with stupid developers who trust an account, instead of downloading the software they depend on and packaging it with their product. We should know by now that anything on the cloud won’t stay there forever.