#1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Platform
Followed by 5.20+ million
The Hacker News Logo
Subscribe – Get Latest News
AWS EKS Security Best Practices

GitHub | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Category — GitHub
Discord Invite Link Hijacking Delivers AsyncRAT and Skuld Stealer Targeting Crypto Wallets

Discord Invite Link Hijacking Delivers AsyncRAT and Skuld Stealer Targeting Crypto Wallets

Jun 14, 2025 Malware / Threat Intelligence
A new malware campaign is exploiting a weakness in Discord's invitation system to deliver an information stealer called Skuld and the AsyncRAT remote access trojan. "Attackers hijacked the links through vanity link registration, allowing them to silently redirect users from trusted sources to malicious servers," Check Point said in a technical report. "The attackers combined the ClickFix phishing technique, multi-stage loaders, and time-based evasions to stealthily deliver AsyncRAT, and a customized Skuld Stealer targeting crypto wallets." The issue with Discord's invite mechanism is that it allows attackers to hijack expired or deleted invite links and secretly redirect unsuspecting users to malicious servers under their control. This also means that a Discord invite link that was once trusted and shared on forums or social media platforms could unwittingly lead users to malicious sites. Details of the campaign come a little over a month after the ...
AI Agents and the Non‑Human Identity Crisis: How to Deploy AI More Securely at Scale

AI Agents and the Non‑Human Identity Crisis: How to Deploy AI More Securely at Scale

May 27, 2025 Artificial Intelligence / Cloud Identity
Artificial intelligence is driving a massive shift in enterprise productivity, from GitHub Copilot's code completions to chatbots that mine internal knowledge bases for instant answers. Each new agent must authenticate to other services, quietly swelling the population of non‑human identities (NHIs) across corporate clouds. That population is already overwhelming the enterprise: many companies now juggle at least 45 machine identities for every human user . Service accounts, CI/CD bots, containers, and AI agents all need secrets, most commonly in the form of API keys, tokens, or certificates, to connect securely to other systems to do their work. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 report reveals the cost of this sprawl: over 23.7 million secrets surfaced on public GitHub in 2024 alone. And instead of making the situation better, repositories with Copilot enabled the leak of secrets 40 percent more often .  NHIs Are Not People Unlike human beings logging into systems, ...
The Persistence Problem: Why Exposed Credentials Remain Unfixed—and How to Change That

The Persistence Problem: Why Exposed Credentials Remain Unfixed—and How to Change That

May 12, 2025 Secrets Management / DevSecOps
Detecting leaked credentials is only half the battle. The real challenge—and often the neglected half of the equation—is what happens after detection. New research from GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 report reveals a disturbing trend: the vast majority of exposed company secrets discovered in public repositories remain valid for years after detection, creating an expanding attack surface that many organizations are failing to address. According to GitGuardian's analysis of exposed secrets across public GitHub repositories, an alarming percentage of credentials detected as far back as 2022 remain valid today: "Detecting a leaked secret is just the first step," says GitGuardian's research team. "The true challenge lies in swift remediation." Why Exposed Secrets Remain Valid This persistent validity suggests two troubling possibilities: either organizations are unaware their credentials have been exposed (a security visibility problem),...
cyber security

SANS Institute Complimentary Training Bundle ($3240 Value) at Network Security 2025

websiteSANS InstituteCyber Security Training
Register to attend in-person training at Network Security 2025 in Las Vegas, NV and claim a complimentary cyber-pro pass that includes an OnDemand bundle, AND a free pass to compete in NetWars!
cyber security

Key Essentials to Modern SaaS Data Resilience

websiteVeeamSaaS Security / Data Resilience
Learn how to modernize your SaaS data protection strategy and strengthen security to avoid risks of data loss.
38,000+ FreeDrain Subdomains Found Exploiting SEO to Steal Crypto Wallet Seed Phrases

38,000+ FreeDrain Subdomains Found Exploiting SEO to Steal Crypto Wallet Seed Phrases

May 08, 2025 Malware / Cloud Security
Cybersecurity researchers have exposed what they say is an "industrial-scale, global cryptocurrency phishing operation" engineered to steal digital assets from cryptocurrency wallets for several years. The campaign has been codenamed FreeDrain by threat intelligence firms SentinelOne and Validin . "FreeDrain uses SEO manipulation, free-tier web services (like gitbook.io, webflow.io, and github.io), and layered redirection techniques to target cryptocurrency wallets," security researchers Kenneth Kinion, Sreekar Madabushi, and Tom Hegel said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Victims search for wallet-related queries, click on high-ranking malicious results, land on lure pages, and are redirected to phishing pages that steal their seed phrases." The scale of the campaign is reflected in the fact that over 38,000 distinct FreeDrain sub-domains hosting lure pages have been identified. These pages are hosted on cloud infrastructure lik...
Crypto Developers Targeted by Python Malware Disguised as Coding Challenges

Crypto Developers Targeted by Python Malware Disguised as Coding Challenges

Apr 15, 2025 Malware / Threat Intelligence
The North Korea-linked threat actor assessed to be behind the massive Bybit hack in February 2025 has been linked to a malicious campaign that targets developers to deliver new stealer malware under the guise of a coding assignment. The activity has been attributed by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 to a hacking group it tracks as Slow Pisces , which is also known as Jade Sleet, PUKCHONG, TraderTraitor, and UNC4899. "Slow Pisces engaged with cryptocurrency developers on LinkedIn, posing as potential employers and sending malware disguised as coding challenges," security researcher Prashil Pattni said . "These challenges require developers to run a compromised project, infecting their systems using malware we have named RN Loader and RN Stealer." Slow Pisces has a history of targeting developers, typically in the cryptocurrency sector, by approaching them on LinkedIn as part of a supposed job opportunity and enticing them into opening a PDF document that details the ...
SpotBugs Access Token Theft Identified as Root Cause of GitHub Supply Chain Attack

SpotBugs Access Token Theft Identified as Root Cause of GitHub Supply Chain Attack

Apr 04, 2025 Vulnerability / Open Source,
The cascading supply chain attack that initially targeted Coinbase before becoming more widespread to single out users of the "tj-actions/changed-files" GitHub Action has been traced further back to the theft of a personal access token ( PAT ) related to SpotBugs. "The attackers obtained initial access by taking advantage of the GitHub Actions workflow of SpotBugs, a popular open-source tool for static analysis of bugs in code," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in an update this week. "This enabled the attackers to move laterally between SpotBugs repositories, until obtaining access to reviewdog." There is evidence to suggest that the malicious activity began as far back as late November 2024, although the attack against Coinbase did not take place until March 2025. Unit 42 said its investigation began with the knowledge that reviewdog's GitHub Action was compromised due to a leaked PAT associated with the project's maintainer. This subsequen...
New Malware Loaders Use Call Stack Spoofing, GitHub C2, and .NET Reactor for Stealth

New Malware Loaders Use Call Stack Spoofing, GitHub C2, and .NET Reactor for Stealth

Apr 02, 2025 Threat Detection / Malware
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an updated version of a malware loader called Hijack Loader that implements new features to evade detection and establish persistence on compromised systems. "Hijack Loader released a new module that implements call stack spoofing to hide the origin of function calls (e.g., API and system calls)," Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Muhammed Irfan V A said in an analysis. "Hijack Loader added a new module to perform anti-VM checks to detect malware analysis environments and sandboxes." Hijack Loader, first discovered in 2023, offers the ability to deliver second-stage payloads such as information stealer malware. It also comes with a variety of modules to bypass security software and inject malicious code. Hijack Loader is tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the names DOILoader, GHOSTPULSE, IDAT Loader, and SHADOWLADDER. In October 2024, HarfangLab and Elastic Security Labs detailed Hijack Loader campaigns t...
Coinbase Initially Targeted in GitHub Actions Supply Chain Attack; 218 Repositories' CI/CD Secrets Exposed

Coinbase Initially Targeted in GitHub Actions Supply Chain Attack; 218 Repositories' CI/CD Secrets Exposed

Mar 23, 2025 Supply Chain / Vulnerability
The supply chain attack involving the GitHub Action "tj-actions/changed-files" started as a highly-targeted attack against one of Coinbase's open-source projects, before evolving into something more widespread in scope. "The payload was focused on exploiting the public CI/CD flow of one of their open source projects – agentkit, probably with the purpose of leveraging it for further compromises," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a report. "However, the attacker was not able to use Coinbase secrets or publish packages." The incident came to light on March 14, 2025, when it was found that "tj-actions/changed-files" was compromised to inject code that leaked sensitive secrets from repositories that ran the workflow. It has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-30066 (CVSS score: 8.6). According to Endor Labs, 218 GitHub repositories are estimated to have exposed their secrets due to the supply chain attack, and a majority of the leak...
CISA Warns of Active Exploitation in GitHub Action Supply Chain Compromise

CISA Warns of Active Exploitation in GitHub Action Supply Chain Compromise

Mar 19, 2025 Vulnerability / DevSecOps
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a vulnerability linked to the supply chain compromise of the GitHub Action, tj-actions/changed-files, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-30066 (CVSS score: 8.6), involves the breach of the GitHub Action to inject malicious code that enables a remote attacker to access sensitive data via actions logs. "The tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action contains an embedded malicious code vulnerability that allows a remote attacker to discover secrets by reading actions logs," CISA said in an alert. "These secrets may include, but are not limited to, valid AWS access keys, GitHub personal access tokens (PATs), npm tokens, and private RSA keys." Cloud security company Wiz has since revealed that the attack may have been an instance of a cascading supply chain attack, with unidentified threat actors first compromising the re...
GitHub Action Compromise Puts CI/CD Secrets at Risk in Over 23,000 Repositories

GitHub Action Compromise Puts CI/CD Secrets at Risk in Over 23,000 Repositories

Mar 17, 2025 Vulnerability / Cloud Security
Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to an incident in which the popular GitHub Action tj-actions/changed-files was compromised to leak secrets from repositories using the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow. The incident involved the tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action, which is used in over 23,000 repositories. It's used to track and retrieve all changed files and directories. The supply chain compromise has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-30066 (CVSS score: 8.6). The incident is said to have taken place sometime before March 14, 2025. "In this attack, the attackers modified the action's code and retroactively updated multiple version tags to reference the malicious commit," StepSecurity said . "The compromised Action prints CI/CD secrets in GitHub Actions build logs." The net result of this behavior is that should the workflow logs be publicly accessible, they could lead to the unauthorized expo...
GitHub Uncovers New ruby-saml Vulnerabilities Allowing Account Takeover Attacks

GitHub Uncovers New ruby-saml Vulnerabilities Allowing Account Takeover Attacks

Mar 13, 2025 Authentication / Vulnerability
Two high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in the open-source ruby-saml library that could allow malicious actors to bypass Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) authentication protections. SAML is an XML-based markup language and open-standard used for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, enabling features like single sign-on (SSO), which allows individuals to use a single set of credentials to access multiple sites, services, and apps. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-25291 and CVE-2025-25292 , carry a CVSS score of 8.8 out of 10.0. They affect the following versions of the library - < 1.12.4 >= 1.13.0, < 1.18.0 Both the shortcomings stem from how both REXML and Nokogiri parse XML differently, causing the two parsers to generate entirely different document structures from the same XML input This parser differential allows an attacker to be able to execute a Signature Wrapping attack, leading to an authentication by...
Microsoft Warns of Malvertising Campaign Infecting Over 1 Million Devices Worldwide

Microsoft Warns of Malvertising Campaign Infecting Over 1 Million Devices Worldwide

Mar 07, 2025 Malvertising / Open Source
Microsoft has disclosed details of a large-scale malvertising campaign that's estimated to have impacted over one million devices globally as part of what it said is an opportunistic attack designed to steal sensitive information. The tech giant, which detected the activity in early December 2024, is tracking it under the broader umbrella Storm-0408, a moniker used for a set of threat actors that are known to distribute remote access or information-stealing malware via phishing, search engine optimization (SEO), or malvertising. "The attack originated from illegal streaming websites embedded with malvertising redirectors, leading to an intermediary website where the user was then redirected to GitHub and two other platforms," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said . "The campaign impacted a wide range of organizations and industries, including both consumer and enterprise devices, highlighting the indiscriminate nature of the attack." The most signifi...
Expert Insights Articles Videos
Cybersecurity Resources