> Attackers turn GitHub issues into supply chain campaign against 61 public repos in less than an hour

EXCLUSIVE Researchers identified at least 83 attacks against 61 public GitHub repositories, including popular open source projects such as Google LangExtract, Trivy, Brave browser, and MLflow, in what they suspect is a coordinated campaign to execute commands in CI/CD environments and steal credentials and access tokens. It all happened very quickly, the Radware threat hunters said in an exclusive interview with The Register. Most (77) of the malicious items were published during a 43-minute time span on September 1, with the remaining six occurring within the next two minutes. “Our guess is that the final aim was a supply-chain attack in which the attacker gains credentials for the repo, and then he has the power to change the contents – the code – as he wishes” and then push the malicious changes to others, Radware VP and researcher Gabi Nakibly told The Register. Nakibly and fellow Radware researcher Zvika Babo say they suspect a single individual is behind this supply chain campaign. This attacker used 74 different GitHub accounts, many of which had legitimate development histories, meaning they were likely compromised. "Considering that dozens of accounts posted the same type of payload, on the same day, within a narrow time window, and to the same infrastructure, it is reasonable to assess that the activity was coordinated,” the team wrote in research shared ahead of publication with The Register. A novel attack chain They discovered the campaign while investigating prompt injection in GitHub – and they told us the attack chain is part of what makes this supply-chain campaign novel, and extremely stealthy. First, the attacker publishes an issue, pull request, or comment containing malicious commands hidden in HTML comments. This ensures the content is not visible in the rendered page. Plus, a GitHub event – like a pull request or issue – can automatically trigger a workflow if the repository is configured to respond to that event, meaning the attacker can be pretty hands-off at this point. “The workflow automatically is triggered within a second, and if the workflow is indeed vulnerable, then the attack is executed successfully,” Nakibly said. The workflow incorporates attacker-controlled content directly into shell source code, and the shell executes the hidden, malicious command, which hoovers up environment variables and attempts to exfiltrate those to an attacker-controlled server. While the researchers examined logs from actual runs, and told us they found two cases containing evidence that the malicious command ran inside the automation environment, they can’t definitively say whether the attacker successfully obtained repository write permissions, modified source code, or compromised downstream software. But they're trying. “The big picture is that the attackers are trying to find every possible way to get inside the repos to get credentials,” Nakibly said. Plus, “the attacker doesn't need to compromise the repository or to have access to its codebase” to do this, Babo added. “Basically, every user with a GitHub account can try to run this attack – it's very easy to start this attack.” Which repos were affected? As of October 13, the threat hunters identified 83 GitHub items with a verified payload across 61 different repositories. The repos span AI frameworks, security tools, development infrastructure, databases, and other widely used open source software projects. The Radware report lists agno-agi/agno (42.7K stars), ToolJet/ToolJet (41.1K), google/langextract (38.9K), aquasecurity/trivy (38.4K), CopilotKit/CopilotKit (38K), and podman-container-tools/podman (33K), among the most popular. Other notable targets included QwenLM/qwen-code (28.5K), mlflow/mlflow (28.4K), discordjs/discord.js (26.8K), cilium/cilium (25.6K), brave/brave-browser (23.9K), dotnet/maui (23.3K), Homebrew/homebrew-cask (22.2K), github/docs (21K), apache/doris (16K), and PX4/PX4-Autopilot (12.8K). “These projects are used by thousands of organizations," Babo said. The researchers disclosed their findings to all of the projects’ maintainers, and most of the repositories were closed or fixed, but they can’t confirm that all of them were. This campaign follows several earlier supply chain attacks against open source security and dev tools as attackers increasingly look for new methods to steal credentials and other secrets. “There is no way to stop the attackers from attempting,” Nakibly said. “The only way is to make sure that the workflow code is resilient, and not vulnerable to such attacks." The researchers recommend applying least-privilege access to CI/CD workflows, and separating as much as possible workflows triggered by external events from jobs with elevated permissions. “Developers should treat external content as untrusted, and also limit the secrets and environment variables that are available to the workflow,” Babo said. ®