Credential-Stealing GitHub Actions Workflows Planted in Tens of Thousands of Repositories
Summary: Attackers compromised the GitHub accounts of Takashi Kitao, author of the 18,400-star pyxel engine, and Henry Wu, original author of Uber's athenadriver, to push a malicious workflow into 27 and 318 repositories respectively, with Wu's account used across a 16-minute window from 21:10 to 21:26 UTC. Socket has identified more than 500 GitHub accounts that committed the workflow to tens of thousands of repositories since October 7, 2026, and the activity is attributed to GhostAction, which exfiltrates secrets to the hard-coded IP 193.32.204[.]199 over plain HTTP.
Key Takeaway: The workflow harvests CI/CD secrets plus AWS keys, Anthropic, OpenAI, and OpenRouter API keys, and GitHub and GitLab tokens from the working tree and entire git history - and every run returns a repository identifier whether or not credentials were found, leaving the operator with a map of reachable execution contexts. The 279 forks in the henrywoo namespace each carry the workflow file, and private forks and downstream mirrors are the most exposed because that is where committed credentials are actually found.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
- Topics
- Supply Chain & AppSec
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