- cross-posted to:
- pulse_of_truth
- lobsters@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- pulse_of_truth
- lobsters@lemmy.bestiver.se
Welp. My Forgejo instance got popped with an RCE two days ago by CVE-2026-60004. Luckily, I noticed the following morning and had the day free to figure out what happened. Let’s dive in!
As a homelab enthusiast, I found this a very interesting post. Here are my take aways from the post that I’m implementing myself:
- Miner detection. I’ve updated monitoring rules to now watch the CPU on my hosts. If the same thing happened to me I would not have been alerted at all as I’m doing simple up / down monitoring. Fixed.
- Access logging. I turned on access logging for my homelab Caddy instances.
- Log retention. I have increased the amount and retention of my logging. The hope is this will help me reconstruct what happened after a breach.
- Logs offsite. The VPS access logs now ride along with the normal backup process, which runs hourly. The homelab side still only gets caught by the weekly VM backup, so that’s next.
- Closed an open signup. My webtrees instance (genealogy) had self registration enabled, which is the same door this guy got hit through. Oops. Fixed.
- Built a tool.
log-inventory.sh, so “could I actually reconstruct what happened” is a command I run instead of a thing I assume.
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Thanks for this! I didn’t understand any of it, but I hope to eventually.
OIDC and zero signups for everything. I’ve been very happy with Pomerium (ZTNA) + Keycloak for all my public facing apps, although the free version doesn’t have any client signals which I was hoping for when I starteed.
My project this week is integrating the app logging I have into Crowdsec and start having Crowdsec do more analysis.
I don’t think I will ever be convinced to leave anything on my home network open to the internet no matter how convenient it is.
It’s fairly safe as long as you add a strong enough form of access control. For example if you put it behind a VPN, or a SSH tunnel, or require mTLS. Even a key in a custom HTTP header or Basic HTTP auth can be good enough if the key is strong enough.
You can further decrease the probability of drive-by bots reaching a publicly exposed service by merely scanning IPs and ports if you use a reverse proxy and hide your service FQDNs and IP.
You can do this by using TLS certs on wildcard domains rather than explicit domains, using explicit CNAMEs for the service subdomains rather than a wildcard domain, and keeping the A/AAAA records on an obfuscated subdomain rather than the base domain. If the bots can’t figure out a FQDN they’re not getting past the reverse proxy even if they find the IP and port.
This is obfuscation not real security but it cuts down tremendously on bot hits.
Nice write up, also glad to see someone using bear blog in the field! Adding your blog to my RSS reader!
I should really do a security checkup on my setup…
Have you thought about log aggregation with something like Prometheus/graphana or ELK?
Lol thinking about cpu notifications for myself. I get notified when the fans ramp up on my server.
Also feed it to wazuh
I’m thinking of adding Falco to my homelab.
What version of forgejo were you using? CVE-2026-60004 references gitea 1.27.1
Unfortunately, Forgejo only offers versioned image tags, meaning no latest tag. I still had mine pinned to v13 which reached EOL 6 months ago in January, 2026.
Glad I am not selfhosting or doing homelab, It is so out of my legau.
Don’t let this discourage you.
You can self host on your local network just fine and never portforward which is what exposes it to the outside.
I don’t need to watch tv or upload pictures to my server outside of my home. Its perfectly useable.
When you are ready and feel more confident you can setup your own wireguard vpn and only expose that.
Then Your device can connected to that vpn tunnels inside and can acces everything like home.
Currently without vpn your device is at risk every time it connects to a network you don’t own. A third party vpn is not a guarantee your data is safe either. Your home vpn though means all your outside the home networking is fully encrypted and outsiders cant even detect your home adresses is running a vpn to hack. (No ping unless you have the key)
