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.
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.
Meanwhile my entire “homelab” except for HA is hosted on a VPS
Not updating stuff + Public sign ups enabled (did you even read the setup guide?) + Unrestricted internet access
Yeah I wonder what could possibly go wrong…
But great writeup
At least he got to learn from it. Never waste a good disaster.
And sharing it with peeps who haven’t encountered these vulnerabilities yet. We are all trying to improve and reading this is better than doomscrolling.
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.
My server got hacked once and was mining crypto! I noticed it when I heard the fans were at 100% when walking passed the room lol. Turns out, qbittorrent-nox used UPNP for its web admin endpoint enabled by default and qbittorrent can do many things like run custom scripts. My mistake was not changing its login credentials. Exposed my full system. Live and learn.
About the only recent even I’ve had was when I was sitting at my desk reading an article. I noticed the mouse slightly move, but I hand no hand on the mouse. I sit there watching it, not manually moving the mouse or typing on the keyboard. It really freaked me out. Turns out, my old desk pad had a slight curl towards the edge the mouse was at, and the curl would make the mouse sense movement ever so slightly. I deployed a new desk pad, and things are back to normal. Whew!
And detected mostly because the automated script kiddie set up a cryptominer to generate $0.0001
There are way more valuable and destructive ways once you have RCE like:
- Searching for committed API keys “anyway my repo is private”
- Ransomware in case there were no backups
Nice write up, also glad to see someone using bear blog in the field! Adding your blog to my RSS reader!
I’m thinking of adding Falco to my homelab.
Thanks for posting that. I hadn’t heard of falco before. Cncf graduated, open source, cloud native. I’m going to give this a shot.
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.
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.
Glad I am not selfhosting or doing homelab, It is so out of my legau.
