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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...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new campaign in which the threat actors have published more than 67 GitHub repositories that claim to offer Python-based hacking tools, but deliver trojanized payloads instead. The activity, codenamed Banana Squad by ReversingLabs, is assessed to be a continuation of a rogue Python campaign that was identified in 2023 as targeting the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository with bogus packages that were downloaded over 75,000 times and came with information-stealing capabilities on Windows systems. The findings build on a previous report from the SANS's Internet Storm Center in November 2024 that detailed a supposed "steam-account-checker" tool hosted on GitHub, which incorporated stealthy features to download additional Python payloads that can inject malicious code into the Exodus cryptocurrency wallet app and harvest sensitive data to an external server ("dieserbenni[.]ru"). Further analysis of the repository a...

The source code of the popular social media app Snapchat was recently surfaced online after a hacker leaked and posted it on the Microsoft-owned code repository GitHub. A GitHub account under the name Khaled Alshehri with the handle i5xx , who claimed to be from Pakistan, created a GitHub repository called Source-Snapchat with a description " Source Code for SnapChat ," publishing the code of what purported to be Snapchat's iOS app. The underlying code could potentially expose the company's extremely confidential information, like the entire design of the hugely-successful messaging app, how the app works and what future features are planned for the app. Snapchat's parent company, Snap Inc., responded to the leak by filing a copyright act request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), helping it takedown the online repository hosting the Snapchat code. SnapChat Hack: Github Took Down Repository After DMCA Notice Though it is not clear...

Microsoft has announced to shut down CodePlex -- its website for hosting repositories of open-source software projects -- on December 15, 2017. Launched in 2006, CodePlex was one of the Microsoft's biggest steps towards the world of open source community -- where any programmer, anywhere can share the code for their software or download and tweak the code to their liking. However, Microsoft says that the service has dramatically fallen in usage and that fewer than 350 projects seeing a source code commit over the last 30 days, pointing to GitHub as the "de-facto place for open source sharing." GitHub – 'Facebook for Programmers' In a blog post published Friday, Microsoft Corporate VP Brian Harry wrote that the shutdown of CodePlex is because the open source community has almost entirely moved over to GitHub, which provides similar functionality for sharing code that people can collaborate on. "Over the years, we have seen a lot of amazing opti...

Threat actors are increasingly making use of GitHub for malicious purposes through novel methods, including abusing secret Gists and issuing malicious commands via git commit messages. "Malware authors occasionally place their samples in services like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Discord to host second stage malware and sidestep detection tools," ReversingLabs researcher Karlo Zanki  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "But lately, we have observed the increasing use of the GitHub open-source development platform for hosting malware." Legitimate public services are  known  to be  used  by  threat actors  for hosting malware and acting as  dead drop resolvers  to fetch the actual command-and-control (C2) address. While using public sources for C2 does not make them immune to takedowns, they do offer the benefit of allowing threat actors to easily create attack infrastructure that's both inexpensive and reliable. ...

GitHub hacked with Ruby on Rails public key vulnerability Github, the service that many professional programmers use to store their work and collaborate on coding, was hacked over the weekend. A young Russian developer Egor Homakov exploited a gaping vulnerability in GitHub that allowed him (or anyone else with basic hacker know-how) to gain administrator access to projects such as Ruby on Rails, Linux, and millions of others. When Github saw what happened, they suspended Homakov's account, which created a firestorm of protest. A blog post entitled, Github, You Have Let Us All Down . Github has succumbed to a public key vulnerability in Ruby on Rails allowing a user administrator access to the popular Rails Git. Homakov's actions were relatively simple - he merely uploaded his public key to the repository so Git thought he was an approved administrator of that project. This would not only entitle Homakov to commit files but he could effectively wipe the entire project and its ...

At least half of dozen GitHub accounts from fake researchers associated with a fraudulent cybersecurity company have been observed pushing malicious repositories on the code hosting service. All seven repositories, which are still available as of writing, claim to be a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for purported zero-day flaws in Discord, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Exchange Server. VulnCheck, which discovered the activity,  said , "the individuals creating these repositories have put significant effort into making them look legitimate by creating a network of accounts and Twitter profiles, pretending to be part of a non-existent company called High Sierra Cyber Security." The cybersecurity firm said it first came across the rogue repositories in early May when they were observed releasing similar PoC exploits for zero-day bugs in Signal and WhatsApp. The repositories hosting the two PoCs have since been taken down. Besides sharing some of the purported findings on Tw...

Unidentified adversaries orchestrated a sophisticated attack campaign that has impacted several individual developers as well as the GitHub organization account associated with Top.gg, a Discord bot discovery site. "The threat actors used multiple TTPs in this attack, including account takeover via stolen browser cookies, contributing malicious code with verified commits, setting up a custom Python mirror, and publishing malicious packages to the PyPI registry," Checkmarx  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The software supply chain attack is said to have led to the theft of sensitive information, including passwords, credentials, and other valuable data. Some aspects of the campaign were  previously   disclosed  at the start of the month by an Egypt-based developer named Mohammed Dief. It chiefly entailed setting up a clever typosquat of the official PyPI domain known as "files. python hosted[.]org," giving it the name "files. pypi ho...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that delivers the Astaroth banking trojan that employs GitHub as a backbone for its operations to stay resilient in the face of infrastructure takedowns. "Instead of relying solely on traditional command-and-control (C2) servers that can be taken down, these attackers are leveraging GitHub repositories to host malware configurations," McAfee Labs researchers Harshil Patel and Prabudh Chakravorty said in a report. "When law enforcement or security researchers shut down their C2 infrastructure, Astaroth simply pulls fresh configurations from GitHub and keeps running." The activity, per the cybersecurity company, is primarily focused on Brazil, although the banking malware is known to target various countries in Latin America, including Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama. This is not the first time Astaroth campaigns have trained t...

Code-hosting platform GitHub Friday officially announced a series of updates to the  site's policies  that delve into how the company deals with malware and exploit code uploaded to its service. "We explicitly permit dual-use security technologies and content related to research into vulnerabilities, malware, and exploits," the Microsoft-owned company  said . "We understand that many security research projects on GitHub are dual-use and broadly beneficial to the security community. We assume positive intention and use of these projects to promote and drive improvements across the ecosystem." Stating that it will not allow the use of GitHub in direct support of unlawful attacks or malware campaigns that cause technical harm, the company said it may take steps to disrupt ongoing attacks that leverage the platform as an exploit or a malware content delivery network (CDN). To that end, users are refrained from uploading, posting, hosting, or transmitting any co...

China has something very impressive that we are not aware of. The country has a powerful and previously unknown weapon that its government is using to bolster their cyber attack capabilities: Dubbed " The Great Cannon. " INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN CHINA When I talk about Internet censorship, it is incomplete if I don't mention China. China is famous for its Great Wall of China and Great Firewall of China . The censoring of Internet access and blocking an individual website in China by its government, known as the Great Firewall of China. But, why the Chinese government does that? The answer is very simple: The Chinese government restricts those contents it deems sensitive for its country's so-called democracy. It illegalize certain online speech and activities, block selected websites, and filter keywords out of searches initiated from computers located in Mainland China. The worse: Those Chinese citizens who offend authorities against Int...

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...

Developers around the world depend on open source components to build their software products. According to industry estimates, open source components account for 60-80% of the code base in modern applications. Collaboration on open source projects throughout the community produces stronger code, squashing the bugs and catching the vulnerabilities that impact the security of organizations who look to open source components as the key to their application building success. Thanks in part to the "thousand eyeballs" of the community, the number of reported vulnerabilities in open source projects is on the rise, spiking 51% in 2017 from the previous year. This is even more concerning since, as shown in the same study, most vulnerabilities are found in popular projects. Data shows that 32% of the top 100 open source projects have at least one vulnerability, meaning that developers have their work cut out for them, no matter which components they are using in their products....

New research has found that over 15,000 Go module repositories on GitHub are vulnerable to an attack called repojacking. "More than 9,000 repositories are vulnerable to repojacking due to GitHub username changes," Jacob Baines, chief technology officer at VulnCheck,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "More than 6,000 repositories were vulnerable to repojacking due to account deletion." Collectively, these repositories account for no less than 800,000 Go module-versions. Repojacking , a portmanteau of "repository" and "hijacking," is an attack technique that allows a bad actor to take advantage of account username changes and deletions to create a repository with the same name and the pre-existing username to stage open-source software supply chain attacks. Earlier this June, cloud security firm Aqua  revealed  that millions of software repositories on GitHub are likely vulnerable to the threat, urging organizations that undergo...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a fresh software supply chain attack targeting the npm registry that has affected more than 40 packages that belong to multiple maintainers. "The compromised versions include a function (NpmModule.updatePackage) that downloads a package tarball, modifies package.json, injects a local script (bundle.js), repacks the archive, and republishes it, enabling automatic trojanization of downstream packages," supply chain security company Socket said . The end goal of the campaign is to search developer machines for secrets using TruffleHog's credential scanner and transmit them to an external server under the attacker's control. The attack is capable of targeting both Windows and Linux systems. The following packages have been identified as impacted by the incident - angulartics2@14.1.2 @ctrl/deluge@7.2.2 @ctrl/golang-template@1.4.3 @ctrl/magnet-link@4.0.4 @ctrl/ngx-codemirror@7.0.2 @ctrl/ngx-csv@6.0.2 @ctrl/ngx-emoji-mart@...

Threat actors are leveraging public GitHub repositories to host malicious payloads and distribute them via Amadey as part of a campaign observed in April 2025. "The MaaS [malware-as-a-service] operators used fake GitHub accounts to host payloads, tools, and Amadey plug-ins, likely as an attempt to bypass web filtering and for ease of use," Cisco Talos researchers Chris Neal and Craig Jackson said in a report published today. The cybersecurity company said the attack chains leverage a malware loader called Emmenhtal (aka PEAKLIGHT) to deliver Amadey, which, for its part, downloads various custom payloads from public GitHub repositories operated by the threat actors. The activity shares tactical similarities with an email phishing campaign that used invoice payment and billing-related lures to distribute SmokeLoader via Emmenhtal in February 2025 in attacks targeting Ukrainian entities.

If one word could sum up the 2021 infosecurity year (well, actually three), it would be these: "supply chain attack".  A software supply chain attack happens when hackers manipulate the code in third-party software components to compromise the 'downstream' applications that use them. In 2021, we have seen a dramatic rise in such attacks: high profile security incidents like the SolarWinds, Kaseya, and  Codecov  data breaches have shaken enterprise's confidence in the security practices of third-party service providers. What does this have to do with secrets, you might ask? In short, a lot. Take the Codecov case (we'll go back to it quickly): it is a textbook example to illustrate how hackers leverage hardcoded credentials to gain initial access into their victims' systems and harvest more secrets down the chain.  Secrets-in-code remains one of the most overlooked vulnerabilities in the application security space, despite being a priority target in hack...