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.
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.
I have knockd listening on one very high port number, and only after accessing that reverse proxy whitelists the source ip. Sure some scanners might do a full port scan and try http only after that, but FQDN is required too. Plus I have geo ip list blocking all but my country. Oh and Crowdsec. So far so good…