GhostAction

GhostAction Campaign Compromises 790 GitHub Repositories via Malicious Workflows

Researchers from OpenSourceMalware have identified 790 publicly accessible GitHub repositories containing malicious workflows planted by the GhostAction campaign as of October 9. The campaign abuses trusted maintainer accounts to inject workflows that automatically exfiltrate secrets including AWS access keys and tokens for GitHub, GitLab, Google, Slack, SendGrid, OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter. Earlier counts by GitGuardian recorded 772 repositories between August 31 and September 30, though the datasets differ and are not cumulative. A separate wave on October 8 impacted 346 repositories linked to two maintainer accounts, including a project belonging to Uber. The malicious workflow runs on code pushes or manual triggers, scans repository files and full Git history for credentials, and sends findings in plaintext to attacker infrastructure. Removing the workflow file does not mitigate exposure, as successful executions already leak credentials and old commits may still contain secrets.

GhostAction Campaign Expands to Inject Malicious GitHub Workflows Stealing AWS Keys and Tokens

The GhostAction campaign has returned with an expanded technique that targets a wider range of credentials across hundreds of repositories. On October 8, two compromised maintainer accounts injected a malicious workflow named security-audit.yml into 346 GitHub repositories, including high-profile projects such as uber/athenadriver and kitao/pyxel. The workflow disguises itself as a security audit routine and executes automatically on every code push, exfiltrating credentials via HTTP requests to attacker-controlled servers. Unlike previous waves that only harvested GitHub Actions secrets, the new version also scans the working directory and full git history for forgotten credentials in older commits. Targeted data includes AWS access keys, GitHub and GitLab tokens, Google API keys, Slack and SendGrid tokens, OpenAI and Anthropic credentials, PyPI passwords, and crates.io tokens. Since October 7, more than 500 GitHub accounts have planted similar workflows, building on earlier campaigns that affected 817 repositories in September 2025 and 772 between August and September.