About this guide
As an organization owner, preventing exposure of private or sensitive data should be a top priority. Whether intentional or accidental, data leaks can cause substantial risk to the parties involved. While GitHub takes measures to help protect you against data leaks, you are also responsible for administering your organization to harden security.
There are several key components when it comes to defending against data leaks:
- Taking a proactive approach towards prevention
- Early detection of possible leaks
- Maintaining a mitigation plan when an incident occurs
The best approach will depend on the type of organization you're managing. For example, an organization that focuses on open source development might require looser controls than a fully commercial organization, to allow for external collaboration. This article provide high level guidance on the GitHub features and settings to consider, which you should implement according to your needs.
Secure accounts
Protect your organization's repositories and settings by implementing security best practices, including enabling 2FA and requiring it for all members, and establishing strong password guidelines.
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Requiring organization members, outside collaborators, and billing managers to enable 2FA for their personal accounts, making it harder for malicious actors to access an organization's repositories and settings. For more information, see Requerir autenticación en dos fases en la organización.
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Encouraging your users to create strong passwords and secure them appropriately, by following GitHub’s recommended password guidelines. For more information, see Crear una contraseña segura.
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Encouraging your users to keep push protection for users enabled in their personal account settings, so that no matter which public repository they push to, they are protected. For more information, see Protección de inserción para usuarios.
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Establishing an internal security policy in GitHub, so users know the appropriate steps to take and who to contact if an incident is suspected. For more information, see Agregar una política de seguridad a tu repositorio.
For more detailed information about securing accounts, see Procedimientos recomendados para proteger las cuentas.
Prevent data leaks
As an organization owner, you should limit and review access as appropriate for the type of your organization. Consider the following settings for tighter control:
| Recommendation | More information |
|---|---|
| Disable the ability to fork repositories. | Administrar la política de ramificación para tu repositorio |
| Disable changing repository visibility. | Restringir cambios en la visibilidad de los repositorios en tu organización |
| Restrict repository creation to private or internal. | Restringir la creación de repositorios en tu organización |
| Disable repository deletion and transfer. | Configurar permisos para eliminar o transferir repositorios en tu organización |
| Scope personal access tokens to the minimum permissions necessary. | None |
| Secure your code by converting public repositories to private whenever appropriate. You can alert the repository owners of this change automatically using a GitHub App. | Prevent-Public-Repos in GitHub Marketplace |
| Confirm your organization’s identity by verifying your domain and restricting email notifications to only verified email domains. | Verificar o aprobar un dominio para tu organización |
| Ensure your organization has upgraded to the GitHub Customer Agreement instead of using the Standard Terms of Service. | Actualización al acuerdo de cliente de GitHub |
| Prevent contributors from making accidental commits. | Eliminación de datos confidenciales de un repositorio |
Detect data leaks
No matter how well you tighten your organization to prevent data leaks, some may still occur, and you can respond by using secret scanning, the audit log, and branch protection rules.
Use secret scanning
Secret scanning helps secure code and keep secrets safe across organizations and repositories by scanning and detecting secrets that were accidentally committed over the full Git history of every branch in GitHub repositories. Any strings that match patterns provided by secret scanning partners, by other service providers, or defined by you or your organization, are reported as alerts in the Security tab of repositories.
There are two forms of secret scanning available: Alertas de examen de secretos para asociados and Alertas de examen de secretos para usuarios.
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Alertas de examen de secretos para asociados: These are enabled by default and automatically run on all public repositories and public npm packages.
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Alertas de examen de secretos para usuarios: To get additional scanning capabilities for your organization, you need to enable alertas de examen de secretos para usuarios.
When enabled, alertas de examen de secretos para usuarios can be detected on the following types of repository:
- Public repositories owned by personal accounts on GitHub.com
- Public repositories owned by organizations
- Private and internal repositories owned by organizations using GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud, with a license for GitHub Code Security
Sugerencia
Regardless of the enablement status of secret scanning and push protection, organizations on GitHub Team and GitHub Enterprise can run a free report to scan the code in the organization for leaked secrets. See About secret security with GitHub.
For more information about secret scanning, see About secret scanning.
También puede habilitar secret scanning como protección de inserción para un repositorio o una organización. Al habilitar esta característica, secret scanning impide que los colaboradores inserten código con un secreto detectado. For more information, see About push protection. Finally, you can also extend the detection to include custom secret string structures. For more information, see Definición de patrones personalizados para el examen de secretos.
Review the audit log for your organization
You can also proactively secure IP and maintain compliance for your organization by leveraging your organization's audit log, along with the GraphQL Audit Log API. For more information, see Revisar el registro de auditoría de tu organización and Interfaces.
Set up branch protection rules
To ensure that all code is properly reviewed prior to being merged into the default branch, you can enable branch protection. By setting branch protection rules, you can enforce certain workflows or requirements before a contributor can push changes. For more information, see Acerca de las ramas protegidas.
Como alternativa a las reglas de protección de ramas, puede crear conjuntos de reglas. Los conjuntos de reglas tienen algunas ventajas sobre las reglas de protección de ramas, como estados, y una mejor detectabilidad sin necesidad de acceso de administrador. Puedes aplicar igualmente varios conjuntos de reglas al mismo tiempo. Para más información, consulta Acerca de los conjuntos de reglas.
Mitigate data leaks
If a user pushes sensitive data, ask them to remove it by using the git filter-repo tool. For more information, see Eliminación de datos confidenciales de un repositorio. Also, if the sensitive data has not been pushed yet, you can just undo those changes locally; for more information, see the GitHub Blog (but note that git revert is not a valid way to undo the addition of sensitive data as it leaves the original sensitive commit in Git history).
If you're unable to coordinate directly with the repository owner to remove data that you're confident you own, you can fill out a DMCA takedown notice form and tell GitHub Support. Make sure to include the problematic commit hashes. For more information, see DMCA takedown notice.
Nota:
If one of your repositories has been taken down due to a false claim, you should fill out a DMCA counter notice form and alert GitHub Support. For more information, see DMCA counter notice.
Revoke exposed tokens
If a personal access tokens has been exposed in a GitHub repository, GitHub secret scanning can be used to report and revoke the token. For more information, see Resolución de alertas del examen de secretos.
You can also revoke personal access tokens that you do not own and have been exposed outside of GitHub repositories. By doing this, you are contributing to the overall security of the GitHub community and can quickly limit the impact of these tokens. If you find exposed personal access tokens either on GitHub or elsewhere, you can submit a revocation request using the REST API. See Revocación.