Mass phishing emails pretending to be Y Combinator right now

65 points by Tremeschin ↗ HN
Just received quite a smart phishing email/notification coming from "GitHub" by a user created less than a week ago (1) which is currently creating multiple issues a minute tagging many random usernames in a repository (2) with a "ycombinatornotify" app (3). The usual - asking to verify wallets, deposit for authorization as I've been selected for funding, etc. All issues contains the content of the email received, so I'll not paste them here (they're gone, but still, a bad idea to paste it).

- (3m in) They seem to have been rate limited or reached a target of 500 issues

- (5m in) Repository was just taken down, hope they automate back a warning

- They have typo-squatted the "y-comb[l]nator [dot] com" domain (with hyphen and L)

Quite urgent actions are needed to stop it, or warn the affected. Will update the submission with more information as time goes.

- [1]: https://github.com/ycombinato/

- [2]: https://github.com/ycombinato/rorg/

- [3]: https://github.com/apps/ycombinatornotify

23 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.3 ms ] thread
you should email hn@ycombinator.com attn: Dang
Thanks, we're getting a lot of emails about this to hn@ycombinator.com.

The best email address for anything like this is security@ycombinator.com, as they handle security issues for all of YC, including applications.

Thanks everyone for letting us know about this.

Yea I just saw this notif on my GH app.
Still at it with a different repo and app that hasn't (yet) been nuked, but I have reported to GitHub.
Also got it, found this thread by googling "ycombiinator"
I also received the notification / phishing attack.

Have reported it to Github

I just got it a few mins ago
I got it too from yccombinator/-notification. They keep trying with different account/repo names.
How will this kind of attack be prevented in the future?
For anyone at GitHub looking at this thread: please update your documentation page about how to report abuse (https://docs.github.com/en/communities/maintaining-your-safe...). I tried to follow the instructions, but I ran into a bunch of dead ends that slowed me down - I couldn't find the report abuse buttons for issues, comments, or repositories, only for the user profile page. I'm on Chrome on a Mac laptop, logged into GitHub.

Also, on the report abuse page that I got to from the user profile page, the green submit button is nearly hidden by the grey footer, even when I scroll the page around and complete the captcha.

I almost thought it was real, since I’ve never received an actual email from YC. Can anyone share how to apply to YC and what the notification process looks like if you’re selected?
To remove resulting notifications, see instructions here https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174283#discuss...

These spam repositories have been deleted, but I still had lingering notifications stuck on GitHub, and I couldn't see them in the UI to remove them (but the small blue notification dot was constantly on). The API hack resolved this problem.

Came here looking for this. Thank you - removed the annoying blue notification now.
I've received it from ycoommbinator/-co
(comment deleted)
Got it this morning both mail INBOX and Github notif
Just got one a minute ago from ycombinator-notify/ycombinator and a bot named mail-notifaction-automatic