The Starlog investigation has taken a hard turn. Last week it was just a missing tag and a suspicious backlink scheme. This week the evidence itself has started disappearing.
Run a GitHub search for “starlog published” in issues right now and you’ll get zero results. A week ago there were 383 of them. The issue on hrbrmstr/pewpew—the one that started this whole thing – is gone. Not closed, not locked. Gone.
The basicScandal account that filed all those issues is gone too.
That’s a notable deletion given that basicScandal was listed as a contributor under the Bishop Fox organization. A real security consultancy, not some throwaway account. Someone with actual professional stakes made a decision to scrub the trail.
The Wayback Machine caught a snapshot before the cleanup, if you want to see what was there.
What’s interesting is what didn’t disappear: the posting has continued, just slower. The pace since April 4th is nowhere near the 186-issues-in-a-day spike that originally flagged this. The RSS and timing data bear it out.
(The beeswarm pulls timestamps from the articles against GitHub issue creation dates – it’s a cleaner picture of the burst pattern than the raw counts.)
So the content’s still going up. The articles still follow the same five-section structure. The byline is still “Rob Ragan.” But the blast radius has been surgically reduced: no more mass-filed issues, no more obvious automation fingerprint, no more easy GitHub search to count the campaign. It’s the same operation running at a pace a human could plausibly maintain, which is exactly what you’d do if someone wrote a post about your automated campaign and you wanted to keep the domain authority accumulation going without the optics.
Whether someone at Bishop Fox made a call or basicScandal acted independently isn’t something I can determine from here. But the cleanup was targeted and fast. You don’t accidentally delete 383 issues and a GitHub account.
If you happen to have a lingering one open, keep the issue closed (GitHub is wonky these days). Don’t add the badge. And if the pace picks back up, we’ll be there to catch it.