The open source code repository Codeberg has blamed the far right for a recent campaign of abuse and harassment across its systems. “Projects advocating tolerance and equal rights” were subjected to spam campaigns using abusive messages, which escalated to spam emails sent to users via Codeberg’s own automated systems. Codeberg says it stands strong “against hate and hatred” that endangers free software projects.
On February 12th, some Codeberg users received emails from Codeberg containing abusive content. The site says that this was sent by an abuser who took advantage of the site’s ability to notify up to 100 users at once, generating a notification email each time. Codeberg says that while it has blocked both the accounts and the functionality they used, “a large amount of notification emails” had already been sent, and the site itself experienced brief downtime.
“Your private data was not leaked,” Codeberg reassures users in a statement. “All emails have been generated through Codeberg’s servers using the notification feature and the abusers had no access to your email address directly.”
Codeberg is a Berlin-based non-profit organization that provides hosting and other services for free and open source software projects. It boasts more than 150,000 users who’ve worked on over 200,000 projects, and claims a community that celebrates “free culture, openness and creativity.”
The organization, mostly run by volunteers, says that while it runs with some extra capacity to handle abuse campaigns, that capacity “was obviously exhausted this time.”
“Spamming notification emails to users is a new abuse vector to us, and we did not sufficiently prepare for this,” the statement says. “For that, we are sorry.” The team is working on plans to improve its protection against this and similar kinds of abuse in the future, while responding to users affected by the recent campaign.
One thing the attack hasn’t done is deter Codeberg’s commitment to open source software, which it says is “endangered” by far-right forces. “By targeting some of our most active translators, nicest designers, best developers and all other motivated contributors, they are hurting the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.”
“We will not be discouraged in our fight against far-right ideologies,” the statement continues. “They are currently on the rise in many parts of the world, and we believe it is important to protect all kinds of marginalized groups. However, if you believe this does not affect your project, you are wrong. Far-right forces pose a threat to all of us.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
