GitLab Security Department, 1 Oct 2019

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From YouTube: What does the Anti-Abuse Team do?

Description

Devin Harris (Senior Security Analyst, Field Security - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/security/#field-security) and Charl de Wit (Security Analyst, Abuse Operations - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/security/#abuse-operations) discuss what exactly the Anti-Abuse Team does at GitLab.

Charl mentions several key links which are here:
- https://about.gitlab.com/terms/
- https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/abuse_reports.html
- Slack: @abuse-team

A

Devin: hello, I'm devin harris, I'm a field security analyst here at gitlab and today, I'm talking with charl from anti-abuse.

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Charl,, would you like to introduce yourself?.

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Charl: yeah. hi everybody., my name is charl de wit,. I'm a security analyst in anti-abuse.

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Devin: awesome. thanks charl,, as you know... ...we've, been trying to increase awareness for the security department here at gitlab, and I just had three simple questions about your team today.

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Charl:, alright devin: firstly,. Can you describe in your own words what your team does?.

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Charl: sure, all right,, so the anti-abuse team. What we mainly do is we investigate and mitigate violations of the acceptable use of gitlab.com.

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So also the acceptable use can be found in section 3 of the gitlab website terms of use.

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Those should be linked in the video below and then just to put that in simpler terms.

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It's basically, when any user uses the platform in a way that they're not supposed to and.

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Examples of that would be, for instance, posting spam and snippets, or using their repositories to distribute malware.

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And all sorts of other bad things that they're not supposed to be doing.

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And then also we in a deal with the dcma requests as well.

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Devin: awesome. awesome. okay, cool.. Thank you that provides some insight.

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Can you tell me about a cool project that your team has worked on or recently completed?.

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Charl: sure., so two things come to mind.. The one is roger from the abuse operation side.

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He's busy building out the automatic mitigation of abusive behavior., sorry,, ok, known abusive behavior.

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So we know something is bad, that we can catch them and mitigate them without any human intervention.

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That'll significantly reduce the load on abuse and also just keep the platform a little bit cleaner and.

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Then one of the other cool things that is being worked on at the moment.

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It's not being worked on by abuse themselves,, but the security automation team.

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So melissa rodriguez, and that team she's busy building some machine learning for the automatic detection of ci runner abuse.

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We're really looking forward to that, should be done by end of quarter.

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Devin:, that's pretty cool. yeah, awesome. thank you. and then lastly, a simple question here is when and how would somebody contact your team?.

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Charl: sure., so if you need an urgent response for us or something that we need attention really quickly.

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You can always just tag us in slack., so that'll be @abuse-team.

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And then, if you have any issues that you would like to abuse them to have a look at or.

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That you think would be relevant to us.. You can always just tag us on the issue.

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And then, if the other option you have is, if you see something that looks.

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Potentially abusive, you can always use the report abuse button that will be on the top right-hand of.

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The page of the users profile and then also will link the process for that under this video, as well.

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Devin: awesome. well,. Thank you very much of a super helpful today, and I'm looking forward to talking to you more.

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Charl:Awesome., thank you very much., really appreciate it.