GhostAction Targets GitHub Repositories for Credentials
Original title: GhostAction Attack Hits Tens of Thousands of GitHub Repositories to Steal Cloud and AI Credentials
Malicious workflows in 30,000+ GitHub repositories steal AWS, AI, and other keys by scanning commit history.
The GhostAction campaign injects credential-stealing GitHub Actions workflows into tens of thousands of repositories. The operator obtains a maintainer credential, extracts hard-coded secret names, and commits the workflow named security-audit.yml. The payload matches 13 regex patterns for keys including AWS AKIA identifiers and posts stolen data to 193.32.204[.]199. Earlier waves hit 817 repositories; this variant pulls full git history with fetch-depth: 0.
- Targets over 30,000 repositories across 3,000 users
- Matches AWS keys, Anthropic, OpenAI, GitHub tokens
- Triggers on any push or manual dispatch
- Exfiltrates secrets to 193.32.204[.]199
- Identified 500+ compromised accounts since October 2026
Impact: stealing cloud and AI credentials
- 1.rotate every named secret
- 2.revoke exposed personal access tokens
- 3.scan full git history for credential classes
- Vendors
- GitHub
- Malware
- GhostAction
- Organizations
- GitGuardianSocket
Indicators of compromise
auto-extracted · verify before use · export allAll| Type | Indicator | Context |
|---|---|---|
| domain | crates.io | highest-value target. The repository ships through PyPI and crates.io, and the payload named its CARGO_REGISTRY_TOKEN, PYPI_PASSW |
| url | http://193.32.204.199 | the file has no security function and posts stolen data to hxxp://193.32.204[.]199. The operator first obtains a maintainer credential, and |
From the original article
3 min read at gbhackers.com
A new wave of the GhostAction supply chain campaign has pushed a credential-stealing GitHub Actions workflow into tens of thousands of repositories. It now hunts for cloud and AI keys buried in source code and git history, in addition to CI/CD secrets. Socket says it has identified more than 500 GitHub accounts that committed the […]
By Mayura Kathir · gbhackers.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.