> Upgrading to GitLab 19.3.6 on October 22 didn’t fix the vulnerability. The fix isn’t in GitLab’s own code but in a patch to Ruby, which GitLab applies only in its official packages. Our image used standard Ruby, so it didn’t get the patch.
> The bug is in Ruby’s regular expression engine, so any program that compiles regular expressions from untrusted input is exposed, not only GitLab.
I feel like this era of constant exploits/patches is really bad for those who build from source or make their own images vs those who rely on provided images and upgrade them often. I really can't think of a decent solution for those people other than being plugged in 24/7 to the latest news which is really unfortunate and must be exhausting...
> I really can't think of a decent solution for those people other than being plugged in 24/7 to the latest news which is really unfortunate and must be exhausting
The future is near constant burning of tokens in your software factory to do this automatically. The labs create the increase in demand for their own product.
That's a for now problem. The future is probably less software surface area exposed to the internet, the removal of unsafe languages from software exposed to the network, services like Cloudflare deploying firewalls to detect exploit attempts, and services that can keep a live database of currently active bots and residential proxies to IP block them.
Alongside the current scanning and patching of software.
At this point if you are self hosting you should have everything behind a VPN. Only companies with their own security and development teams should be putting things on the public internet.
Gosh I'm at a big company and I'm pretty sure all the self-hosted tools are only accessible through VPN-like tech anyway. The only truly public stuff is Jira, Confluence (which I assume it more to do with Atlassian's pricing of self-hosted) and Sharepoint.
Atlassian products (Jira Server) are no longer supported, and their more Enterprise offering dies in 2029, so everything is ending up in their cloud now yeah.
I know a lot of companies vibe-coding alternatives. I'm not an expert but it's perhaps even illegal for most European companies to migrate any customer data to Atlassian servers.
> We have not requested CVE identifiers in Ruby for these fixes, at least for now.
> Ruby has generally considered it unsafe to compile and use a regular expression created from untrusted input. We stated this in the advisory for CVE-2022-28738, where we nevertheless treated a double free in Regexp compilation as a vulnerability after a comprehensive assessment. We did the same for CVE-2024-27282.
It's a Bad Idea (TM) to compile a regular expression from an untrusted input.
Despite what anyone would try to sell you, a regular expression is a programming language. It's Always A Bad Idea (TM) to compile untrusted input into any kind of programming language. Don't string concatenate SQL queries, eval is evil, it's all the same idea.
What’s interesting with steam boilers and other types of OSHA related injuries is that it’s not enough that the person who’s doing the stupid thing dies: you have to enforce it even more and even higher. People won’t value their life.
The world has changed but 15 years ago we thought it was utterly insane to just pull whatever $latest from $internetsite.probablytrusted.org as part of your build and deployment process.
The patch for Ruby came out 6 days ago. Most Rails apps do not use the Ruby from the package manager but have a hardcoded version in the repo. So unless you have developers releasing a PR to update ruby the moment it comes out, you aren't safe.
This might feel like a "Yeah obviously" moment, but the fact is that very few Rails apps are running the latest ruby release the moment it comes out.
> build from source or make their own images vs those who rely on provided images and upgrade them often.
I mean - this incident brings it into sharper focus - but it's always been thus.
As a Go developer I often tell people "Be wary of vendoring, you are creating a cache of dependencies that need to be managed and maintained"
Or people that "pin" dependencies, they face the same difficulty.
Why not just use "official" (in this case) images - sometimes they lag too - hell, most Linux distributions lag so much with Go compiler packages that, again, I routinely tell people to avoid them in favour of watching the Go official page
Does anyone know for sure which unsupported versions of ruby are affected? Best I can tell 3 of the four affect old versions of ruby that are not getting a security patch for this. Update your ruby!
I've been calling this out for forever now and have been repeatedly told that actually, competent devs with C are fine and the C software we use has been battle tested so it's largely secure.
And how does Rust help? As far as I know, an integer overflow in Rust panics in debug but just wraps in release (a bad choice in my opinion). Would it help specifically in the code execution part of the exploit?
The key difference is even If an Integer overflows in Rust It still doesn't violate memory safety in safe Rust and therefore doesn't lead to exploitation.
This is a fantastic write up on the security incident. Almost any incident like this will have unknowns. It's good to make it explicit. I especially liked the part of what would have been leaked if the attacker was successful. Maybe they could include what type of hash was used.
Have researchers coined the term `Superbug` or `MegaVuln` yet?
Surely we're approaching a point where an LLM discovers a critical, unfixable vulnerability in every device running any version of $OS, then irresponsibly discloses it, triggering mass collective trauma among admins worldwide, significant downtime in critical infrastructure and scores of deaths.
We've adopted a zero-risk posture at our org. We've taken down numerous amounts of services over the last few weeks related to PHP, Node, and Python until things are properly vetted.
We joked in our last internal meeting that this is the end of public software... I have a feeling we may be right, at least in the very short term.
That's what Meltdown, Spectre, Rowhammer, and other hardware bugs have been. While you can't patch the hardware, there have always been software level mitigations.
Thankfully a lot of the low level stuff is just not that exposed to the network so even if you find a bug in some firmware, you still have to find a way to access it over the network.
> Upgrading to GitLab 19.3.6 on October 22 didn’t fix the vulnerability. The fix isn’t in GitLab’s own code but in a patch to Ruby, which GitLab applies only in its official packages. Our image used standard Ruby, so it didn’t get the patch.
> The bug is in Ruby’s regular expression engine, so any program that compiles regular expressions from untrusted input is exposed, not only GitLab.
I feel like this era of constant exploits/patches is really bad for those who build from source or make their own images vs those who rely on provided images and upgrade them often. I really can't think of a decent solution for those people other than being plugged in 24/7 to the latest news which is really unfortunate and must be exhausting...
> I really can't think of a decent solution for those people other than being plugged in 24/7 to the latest news which is really unfortunate and must be exhausting
The future is near constant burning of tokens in your software factory to do this automatically. The labs create the increase in demand for their own product.
That's a for now problem. The future is probably less software surface area exposed to the internet, the removal of unsafe languages from software exposed to the network, services like Cloudflare deploying firewalls to detect exploit attempts, and services that can keep a live database of currently active bots and residential proxies to IP block them.
Alongside the current scanning and patching of software.
At this point if you are self hosting you should have everything behind a VPN. Only companies with their own security and development teams should be putting things on the public internet.
Gosh I'm at a big company and I'm pretty sure all the self-hosted tools are only accessible through VPN-like tech anyway. The only truly public stuff is Jira, Confluence (which I assume it more to do with Atlassian's pricing of self-hosted) and Sharepoint.
Atlassian products (Jira Server) are no longer supported, and their more Enterprise offering dies in 2029, so everything is ending up in their cloud now yeah.
I know a lot of companies vibe-coding alternatives. I'm not an expert but it's perhaps even illegal for most European companies to migrate any customer data to Atlassian servers.
Can you give more information on "illegal for most European companies" part? Asking for a EU company using Jira :)
This is how SaaS dies, vibe-coded to death.
I’m doing my part!
this is a really bad look in 2026 imo
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2026/10/23/regexp-fixes-fo...
> We have not requested CVE identifiers in Ruby for these fixes, at least for now.
> Ruby has generally considered it unsafe to compile and use a regular expression created from untrusted input. We stated this in the advisory for CVE-2022-28738, where we nevertheless treated a double free in Regexp compilation as a vulnerability after a comprehensive assessment. We did the same for CVE-2024-27282.
It's a Bad Idea (TM) to compile a regular expression from an untrusted input.
Despite what anyone would try to sell you, a regular expression is a programming language. It's Always A Bad Idea (TM) to compile untrusted input into any kind of programming language. Don't string concatenate SQL queries, eval is evil, it's all the same idea.
The PHP2Shell one was both lucrative and exhausting. I maintain a bunch of legacy PHP apps.
At the beginning of the industrialization there were many accidents with steam boilers.
We've git that under control with regulation and the help of organizations, some of which still exist today.
This "era of constant exploits/patches" is not normal and can't go on. Currently it is an ongoing cat and mouse game, but it doesn't have to be.
What’s interesting with steam boilers and other types of OSHA related injuries is that it’s not enough that the person who’s doing the stupid thing dies: you have to enforce it even more and even higher. People won’t value their life.
The world has changed but 15 years ago we thought it was utterly insane to just pull whatever $latest from $internetsite.probablytrusted.org as part of your build and deployment process.
It's not maintainable unless you autobuild, and yes, upgrade treadmill.
The patch for Ruby came out 6 days ago. Most Rails apps do not use the Ruby from the package manager but have a hardcoded version in the repo. So unless you have developers releasing a PR to update ruby the moment it comes out, you aren't safe.
This might feel like a "Yeah obviously" moment, but the fact is that very few Rails apps are running the latest ruby release the moment it comes out.
True for many others right? PHP, Python, JS, Lua..what if some finds an old exploit in Perl, oh heck.
> build from source or make their own images vs those who rely on provided images and upgrade them often.
I mean - this incident brings it into sharper focus - but it's always been thus.
As a Go developer I often tell people "Be wary of vendoring, you are creating a cache of dependencies that need to be managed and maintained"
Or people that "pin" dependencies, they face the same difficulty.
Why not just use "official" (in this case) images - sometimes they lag too - hell, most Linux distributions lag so much with Go compiler packages that, again, I routinely tell people to avoid them in favour of watching the Go official page
Does anyone know for sure which unsupported versions of ruby are affected? Best I can tell 3 of the four affect old versions of ruby that are not getting a security patch for this. Update your ruby!
I do think CVE-2026-89078 - the double free one - may only affect ruby 3.3.11 and above. It relies on a bug introduced in ruby 3.4/4 via https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/8cd295ecf0 and backported (maybe accidentally?) in 3.3.11/12 in https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/e02c892ade. So that one is getting patched on all rubies it would have affected.
The bug is integer overflow in a random C data-processing library (specifically regexes) leading to RCE.
Who else is tired of C libraries since this week?
I've been calling this out for forever now and have been repeatedly told that actually, competent devs with C are fine and the C software we use has been battle tested so it's largely secure.
And now we are seeing that was all untrue.
now it's even more battle tested!
And how does Rust help? As far as I know, an integer overflow in Rust panics in debug but just wraps in release (a bad choice in my opinion). Would it help specifically in the code execution part of the exploit?
The key difference is even If an Integer overflows in Rust It still doesn't violate memory safety in safe Rust and therefore doesn't lead to exploitation.
This is a fantastic write up on the security incident. Almost any incident like this will have unknowns. It's good to make it explicit. I especially liked the part of what would have been leaked if the attacker was successful. Maybe they could include what type of hash was used.
Have researchers coined the term `Superbug` or `MegaVuln` yet?
Surely we're approaching a point where an LLM discovers a critical, unfixable vulnerability in every device running any version of $OS, then irresponsibly discloses it, triggering mass collective trauma among admins worldwide, significant downtime in critical infrastructure and scores of deaths.
We've adopted a zero-risk posture at our org. We've taken down numerous amounts of services over the last few weeks related to PHP, Node, and Python until things are properly vetted.
We joked in our last internal meeting that this is the end of public software... I have a feeling we may be right, at least in the very short term.
your linux distro is built on perl and python
That's what Meltdown, Spectre, Rowhammer, and other hardware bugs have been. While you can't patch the hardware, there have always been software level mitigations.
Thankfully a lot of the low level stuff is just not that exposed to the network so even if you find a bug in some firmware, you still have to find a way to access it over the network.