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New kind of GitHub fraud: how is this happening and how do HN users handle it?

There's a fraudulent GitHub account that's stolen my bio and cloned one of my repos. I've reported to GitHub.

I'm seeking HN advice about the technical git aspects, because the fake user has somehow inserted themself as the "author" of many commits, then listed me as the "committer".

What are any ways to help protect from this kind of attack and/or fraud? And how are HN people protecting from this kind of attack, meaning how to verify genuine authors and genuine repos, and block fake authors and fake repos?

Here's me and the real repo:

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision...

Here's the fake user and the fake commits:

https://github.com/bestsoftwareandcodereviews3/architecture-...

The problem seems to be much larger than just me, because there are many similar fake accounts, that are stealing bios and forging commit histories for many popular open source repos such as Granite, Fastlane, Apollo GraphQL, einops ML, etc.

https://github.com/bestsoftwareandcodereviews1

https://github.com/bestsoftwareandcodereviews2

https://github.com/bestsoftwareandcodereviews3

https://github.com/bestsoftwareandcodereviews4

etc.

Update: I'm now in touch with some of the other real authors. One discovered the fraud 10 days ago, reported it to GitHub, yet still hasn't had any response.

10 points jph 2 years ago 9 comments

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