alt Hacker News> 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...
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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.
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.
The PHP2Shell one was both lucrative and exhausting. I maintain a bunch of legacy PHP apps.
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.
Dynamically linked dependencies? CI and semver aware automatic dependency tracking? Automatic updates pointed at personal app depots?
> 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.
It's not maintainable unless you autobuild, and yes, upgrade treadmill.
> 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
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.