GitHub, which is one of the largest repositories of commercial and open source software on the web, has been hacked.

Developer Egor Homakov found a huge hole in GitHub that allowed him to gain administrator access to projects such as Ruby on Rails, Linux, and millions of others. Apparently he found himself with the power to delete the entire history of projects such as jQuery, Node.js, Reddit, and Redis.

GitHub has even outgrown Sourceforge as the best place to pick up software. It is a web-based wrapper around Linus Torvalds’ Git revision control system. The difference is that it has social network features like feeds, friends, and trends. But GitHub has never been hacked even though many people must have known about the flaw. Github uses the Ruby on Rails application framework, and Rails can be taken down using a mass-assignment vulnerability.

Homakov exploited this vulnerability to add his public key to the Rails project on GitHub, which then meant that GitHub identified him as an administrator of the project. GitHub summarily suspended Homakov, fixed the hole, and, after “reviewing his activity,” he has been reinstated.