New research has found that it is possible for threat actors to abuse a legitimate feature in GitHub Codespaces to deliver malware to victim systems.
GitHub Codespaces is a cloud-based configurable development environment that allows users to debug, maintain, and commit changes to a given codebase from a web browser or via an integration in Visual Studio Code.
It also comes with a port forwarding feature that makes it possible to access a web application that’s running on a particular port within the codespace directly from the browser on a local machine for testing and debugging purposes.
“You can also forward a port manually, label forwarded ports, share forwarded ports with members of your organization, share forwarded ports publicly, and add forwarded ports to the codespace configuration,” GitHub explains in its documentation.
It’s important to note here that any forwarded port that’s made public will also permit any party with knowledge of the URL and port number to view the running application sans any authentication.
