alt.hn

3/22/2026 at 9:45:14 AM

Trivy under attack again: Widespread GitHub Actions tag compromise secrets

 https://socket.dev/blog/trivy-under-attack-again-github-actions-compromise

by jicea

3/23/2026 at 7:50:34 PM

"GitHub's own security guidance recommends pinning actions to full commit SHAs as the only truly immutable way to consume an action"

Why doesn't GitHub just enforce immutable versioning for actions? If you don't want immutable releases, you don't get to publish an Action. They could decide to enforce this and mitigate this class of issue.

by tkzed49

3/23/2026 at 8:52:05 PM

> Why doesn't GitHub just enforce immutable versioning for actions?

I always wish these arguments came with a requirement to include a response to "well, what about the other side of the coin?", otherwise, you've now forced me to ask: well?

The two sides of the coin: Security wants pinned versions, like you have, so that compromises aren't pulled in. Security does not want¹ pinned versions, so that security updates are pulled in.

The trick, of course, is some solution that allows the latter without the former, that doesn't just destroy dev productivity. And remember, …there is no evil bit.

(… I need to name this Law. "The Paradox of Pinning"?)

(¹it might not be so explicitly state, but a desire to have constant updated-ness w/ security patches amounts to an argument against pinning.)

by deathanatos

3/23/2026 at 9:50:17 PM

> it might not be so explicitly state, but a desire to have constant updated-ness w/ security patches amounts to an argument against pinning

When you want to update, you update the hashes too. This isn’t an issue in any other packaging ecosystem, where locking (including hashing) is a baseline expectation. The main issue is developer ergonomics, which comes back to GitHub Actions providing very poor package management primitives out of the box.

(This is the key distinction between updating and passively being updated because you have mutable pointers to package state. The latter gets confused for the former, but you almost always want the former.)

by woodruffw

3/24/2026 at 12:00:10 AM

Honestly what I really want is the latter (mutable references), but pointing to aliases that I own and update manually (the former).

by NewJazz

3/24/2026 at 10:42:01 AM

So, fork the action repository and pull from upstream at your own pace?

by ishouldbework

3/24/2026 at 10:53:41 AM

So JFrog

by mememememememo

3/24/2026 at 12:32:37 AM

Yeah, that’s essentially what a lockfile would provide. I think GitHub Actions should really have an (official) one.

by woodruffw

3/24/2026 at 10:53:00 AM

Auto upgrade to version deemed OK by security team. Basically you need to get updates that patch exploits then wait and be more patient for feature upgrades.

by mememememememo

3/23/2026 at 8:56:09 PM

Their question isn't about pinned versions, it's about immutable versions. The question is why it is possible to change what commit "v5" refers to, not "why would you want to write v5".

You already don't get updates pulled in with the system unless they swap the version out from under you, which is not a normal way to deploy.

by staticassertion

3/23/2026 at 9:15:20 PM

One of the only useful things my previous employer did was disallow moving tags via hg hooks.

by irishcoffee

3/23/2026 at 11:06:24 PM

Version tags should obviously be immutable, and if you want to be automatically updated you can select 1.0.*, if you don't you just pick the version tag.

by patmorgan23

3/23/2026 at 9:16:27 PM

It amounts to an argument against pinning in a (IMO) weird world view where the package maintainer is responsible for the security of users' systems. That feels wrong. The user should be responsible for the security of their system, and for setting their own update policy. I don't want a volunteer making decisions about when I get updates on my machine, and I'm pretty security minded. Sure, make the update available, but I'll decide when to actually install it.

In a more broad sense I think computing needs to move away from these centralised models where 'random person in Nebraska'[0] is silently doing a bunch of work for everyone, even with good intentions. Decisions should be deferred to the user as much as possible.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/2347/

by cedws

3/24/2026 at 5:13:25 AM

You can pin a GitHub Action to a SHA, but the GitHub Action can be a Docker one pointing to a mutable Docker image label.

Example:

https://github.com/github-community-projects/issue-metrics/b...

> Why doesn't GitHub just enforce immutable versioning for actions?

You can't. They can execute arbitrary code. They can download another bash file via Curl and execute that.

by OptionOfT

3/24/2026 at 6:12:23 AM

> You can't. They can execute arbitrary code. They can download another bash file via Curl and execute that.

Presumably you'd check the code of the action before you include it (and then don't use an action with non-pinned versions). This way you know the action won't execute arbitrary code for this version and won't get any other code because of version pinning.

The docker action you linked is ironic in this regard since every other version in the code seems to be pinned except the one you linked to.

by zufallsheld

3/24/2026 at 7:43:48 AM

This recommendation is currently broken. Even when you pin the full commit SHA for an action, that action may still pull in transitive dependencies (other actions) that aren't pinned.

by joeig

3/24/2026 at 3:30:17 AM

A better question perhaps is why we’ve allowed ourselves to be so vulnerable by a single provider (GitHub). Supply chain attacks would have a significantly smaller blast radius if people start using their own forges. GitHub as a social network is no longer a good idea

by isodev

3/24/2026 at 1:38:30 AM

Even then, that's only immutable for the workflow config. Many workflows then go on to pull in mutable inputs downstream (eg: default to "latest" version).

by allset_

3/23/2026 at 8:56:42 PM

I assume this is because it is modeled after git tags, and at this point it would be a major change to move away from this. But it should probably get started at some point.

by staticassertion

3/23/2026 at 9:33:09 PM

what if you pin it to a version that is compromised for years before finding out?

Allowing it to be updated can also fix security problems.

It’s basically all the same arguments as static vs dynamic linking.

Plus, I believe I saw that the one action was getting the latest version of trivy anyway.

by dec0dedab0de

3/24/2026 at 12:40:01 AM

Because the true name of the feature is VisualSourceSafe actions. It's all over the code of the runner if you take a second to look, and the runner, like the rest of the feature, is of typical early 2000s Microsoft quality, which is to say, none at all.

by GauntletWizard

3/24/2026 at 1:36:25 AM

GitHub Actions, the feature that was years in the making, and launched in August 2018. Which Microsoft then acquired 2 months later.

by glenngillen

3/24/2026 at 2:35:55 AM

Yep, once you start looking into the inner workings, you realize it's just a rebranded Azure Pipelines with a ton of technical debt attached.

by silverwind

3/23/2026 at 8:04:10 PM

[dead]

by sieabahlpark

3/23/2026 at 6:52:49 PM

My initial thought is that if this isn't a new compromise, Trivy must not have rotated the old credentials. They claim, however,

> We rotated secrets and tokens, but the process wasn't atomic and attackers may have been privy to refreshed tokens

… does anyone know what exactly they're talking about, here? To my knowledge, GH does not divulge new tokens after they're issued, but it depends on the exact auth type we're talking about, and GH has an absurd number of different types of tokens/keys one can use.

by deathanatos

3/23/2026 at 7:11:38 PM

OpenClaw creator made some related claims, that as soon as he created a GitHub organization with a new name, somehow it was stolen from him, and he had to ask Github people to do it for him atomically.

by dist-epoch

3/23/2026 at 10:50:06 PM

It is a bit different. What happened to openclaw:

He created a new org “openclaw” to reserve the name. Then he wanted to swap it with “moltbot” org.

So he opened two browser windows, one with “moltbot” repo settings another with “openclaw” repo settings.

Then he renamed “openclaw” to whatever, and quickly tried to rename “moltbot” to now available “openclaw”.

But in a second when “openclaw” was available, a bot snatched the repo.

by tgrowazay

3/23/2026 at 5:20:29 PM

> On March 22, 2026, a threat actor used compromised credentials to publish a malicious Trivy v0.69.5 and v0.69.6 DockerHub images. (https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/security/advisories/GH...)

So the first incident was on March 19th and the second incident is March 22nd —- evidently the attackers maintained persistence through maybe two separate credential rotation efforts.

by Shank

3/23/2026 at 7:39:16 PM

As far as I understood it, their entire repo got pwnd in February, and this now is the third successful attack by the same actor.

by woodpanel

3/23/2026 at 11:17:38 PM

This is a good wake-up call (or reminder) that many “supply chain security” products are no more secure or responsibly engineered than the stacks they’re intended to protect. This is a characteristic of security software in general, but the rise of these kinds of “run us everywhere” tools/products invite new and exciting ways for an attacker to compromise large numbers of users in a single campaign.

by woodruffw

3/23/2026 at 5:06:09 PM

Recent and related:

Trivy ecosystem supply chain temporarily compromised - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47450142 - March 2026 (35 comments)

by dang

3/23/2026 at 6:48:16 PM

temporarily might be a bit of an euphemism here

by wolfi1

3/23/2026 at 7:13:08 PM

temporally

by dizhn

3/23/2026 at 6:13:38 PM

You're supposed to scan for vulnerabilities, not become one!

by PunchyHamster

3/23/2026 at 7:11:58 PM

When you stare into the vuln, the vuln stares back at you.

by jl6

3/23/2026 at 5:23:53 PM

Friendly reminder that just because someone is building security software it doesn't mean they are competent and won't cause more harm than good.

Every month the security team wants me to give full code or cloud access to some new scanner they want to trial. They love the fancy dashboards and lengthy reports but if I allowed just 10% of what they wanted we would be pwned on the regular...

by progbits

3/23/2026 at 5:51:50 PM

I audited Trivy's GitHub Actions a while back and found some worrying things, the most worrying bit was in the setup-trivy Action where it was doing a clone of main of the trivy repo and executing a shell script in there. There was no ref pinning until somebody raised a PR a few months ago. So a security company gave themselves arbitrary code execution in everyone's CI workflows.

Aqua were breached earlier this month, failed to contain it, got breached again last week, failed to contain it again, and now the attackers have breached their Docker Hub account. Shit happens but they're clearly not capable of handling this and should be enlisting outside help.

by cedws

3/24/2026 at 12:03:29 AM

The ref pinning part is almost worse than no pinning. You can pin the action itself to a commit SHA, sure. But half the actions out there clone other repos, curl binaries, or run install scripts internally. Basically none of that is covered by your pin. You're trusting that the action author didn't stick a `curl | bash` somewhere in their own infra.

Audited our CI a few months back and found two actions doing exactly that. Pinned to SHA on our end, completely unpinned fetches happening inside.

by nulltrace

3/23/2026 at 7:52:25 PM

It seems they did end up contracting with Sygnia

by NewJazz

3/23/2026 at 6:38:32 PM

Granting broad access to "security" tools so some vendor can take another shot at your prod keys is not risk reduction. Most of these things are just report printers that makes more noise than a legacy SIEM, and once an attacker is inside they don't do much besides dump findings into a dashboard nobody will read.

If you want less self-inflicted damage, stick new scanners in a tight sandbox, feed them read-only miror data, and keep them away from prod perms until they have earned trust with a boring review of exactly what they touch and where the data goes. Otherwise you may as well wire your secrets to a public pastebin and call it testing.

by hrmtst93837

3/23/2026 at 7:03:26 PM

Couldn't agree more.

Yet many of these tools have setup like: create a service account, give it about thousand permissions (if not outright full ownership) and send us the JSON private key.

At least they make the red flag nice and obvious.

by progbits

3/23/2026 at 5:36:36 PM

Most of corporate security nowadays involves "endpoint security solutions" installed on all devices, servers and VMs, piping everything into an AI-powered dashboard so we can move fast and break everything.

by hootz

3/23/2026 at 8:48:39 PM

My hypothesis is that generally, there's no quality floor at which security departments are "allowed" to say "actually, none of the options on the market in this category are good enough; we're not going to use any of them". The norm is to reflexively accept extreme invasiveness and always say yes to adding more software to the pile. When these norms run deeply enough in a department, it's effectively institutionally incapable of avoiding shitty security software.

Fwiw w/r/t Trivy in particular,I don't think Trivy is bad software and I use it at work. We're unaffected by this breach because we use Nix to provide our code scanning tools and we write our own Actions workflows. Our Trivy version is pinned by Nix and periodically updated manually, so we've skipped these bad releases.

by pxc

3/23/2026 at 8:09:28 PM

[dead]

by therealdkz

3/24/2026 at 7:39:11 AM

This has always been my big "WTH?" whenever I see people using github actions. "You're literally taking someone else's script and ruining it against your codebase"

by raffraffraff

3/23/2026 at 7:19:09 PM

Well, not my best 2 weeks at work, now I have to fill out a dozen forms and sit trough a shitload of meeting, just because they got pwned (twice, or once, but really badly :D )

by d3nit

3/24/2026 at 12:51:00 AM

So by wanting to improve the security of my application, I ended up lowering the security of my application? Nice.

by pietz

3/23/2026 at 5:35:47 PM

Wasn't this discovered already last week, on Friday, that the threat actor had replaced the legit images with malware images? And republished 75 out of 76 tags?

by xinayder

3/23/2026 at 5:37:41 PM

No, the actor reappeared. This article is not fully updated. On March 22nd, the actor compromised their DockerHub account and published new Docker images.

by Shank

3/24/2026 at 6:13:02 AM

This post is from March 20 and update on 22! Not today!!!

Please don’t scare people like this!

by apexalpha

3/23/2026 at 5:26:52 PM

/s But I thought npm was the issue, and all of this couldn't happen anywhere else?!

by h1fra

3/23/2026 at 5:34:07 PM

What if we just rebuild everything from scratch with AI? No more supply chain attacks!

by hootz

3/23/2026 at 5:39:33 PM

Just use OpenClaw. Oh wait, I think Microslop already did...

by classified

3/23/2026 at 8:57:59 PM

No one has ever said that supply chain attacks are limited to npm.

by staticassertion

3/23/2026 at 5:37:07 PM

Don't underestimate the prowess of Microslop to fuck up. I'm just glad I saw all of this coming and abandoned this hellscape long ago.

by classified

3/23/2026 at 6:30:54 PM

How the heck are credential compromises still a thing with 2FA and refresh tokens???

by huslage

3/23/2026 at 11:01:21 PM

Since there is no requirement for anyone to use them... people don't use them. If people aren't forced to do the right thing, they do the lazy thing.

by 0xbadcafebee

3/24/2026 at 3:41:05 AM

Usually through service accounts. Those are single factor.

by itscrush

3/23/2026 at 7:15:16 PM

How bugs are still possible now when we all write everything in Rust?

by febusravenga

3/23/2026 at 6:47:00 PM

second breach in a month from the same initial credential compromise. the first rotation didn't fully revoke access. the attacker walked right back in. no persistence needed.

by kevincloudsec

3/23/2026 at 5:36:58 PM

I always run such tools inside sandboxes to limit the blast radius.

by ashishb

3/23/2026 at 6:14:37 PM

The sandbox will need internet access (to update data) and you will need to send code to test into it; so compromise already equals leaking all your code, without even breaking the sandboxing

by PunchyHamster

3/23/2026 at 6:33:49 PM

> The sandbox will need internet access (to update data) and you will need to send code to test into it; so compromise already equals leaking all your code, without even breaking the sandboxing

Compromising all code in one directory is bad. Compromising all my data in all other directories, including mounted cloud drives, is worse.

I restrict most dev tools to access only the current directory.

by ashishb

3/23/2026 at 7:35:12 PM

You only need internet access to grab the image, I don't think trivy requires internet access itself. All of my image scanning tools run in isolation.

by staticassertion

3/23/2026 at 5:50:40 PM

I don't think it would help here, they were stealing credentials

by wswin

3/23/2026 at 6:56:35 PM

Whenever possible, credentials shouldn't be inside the sandbox either. Credential proxying, or transparent credential injection, for example with Sandcat: https://github.com/VirtusLab/sandcat

by tux1968

3/23/2026 at 7:42:13 PM

> I don't think it would help here, they were stealing credentials

So, stealing credentials in the current directory and in all other directories are the same thing?

by ashishb

3/23/2026 at 10:53:46 PM

> This allowed the threat actor to perform authenticated operations, including force-updating tags

Hey look, infrastructure underpinning the security of thousands of products, being compromised in a way a simple setting could have prevented (Do not allow overriding tags is an old GH setting). Yet another reason we need a Software Building Code. I wonder how many more of these reasons we'll find in 2026.

by 0xbadcafebee

3/24/2026 at 5:04:43 AM

"This is a good reminder for any bot or automation service using GitHub Actions for deployment. Trade-only API keys with no withdrawal permissions become even more critical when your CI/CD pipeline could be compromised. Separation of concerns saves accounts."

by momoddo

3/24/2026 at 12:03:44 AM

[dead]

by iam_circuit

3/23/2026 at 7:28:41 PM

[dead]

by ohsecurity

3/23/2026 at 6:23:05 PM

[flagged]

by Pahacker

3/23/2026 at 5:29:36 PM

fatiguing

by yieldcrv

3/23/2026 at 6:23:11 PM

GG

by Pahacker

3/23/2026 at 7:54:50 PM

People have been warning about giant security holes in GitHub Actions dependency but MS did nothing.

by g947o

3/24/2026 at 4:06:16 AM

They warned you!

by eviks

3/24/2026 at 9:28:45 AM

This pattern keeps recurring because the root cause isn't really about Trivy specifically — it's that GitHub Actions has no native concept of content-addressed references at the UX layer.

The SHA pinning workaround works, but it shifts the maintenance burden to the consumer. Every upstream patch now requires a manual (or bot-assisted) SHA update. Most teams don't have that automation in place, so they either accept the security risk or fall behind on patches.

The interesting design question is: what would a CI/CD system look like if it managed its own Action versions rather than delegating that to workflow YAML? You'd get immutability by default without the maintenance overhead.

(I've been exploring this problem with FlowEasy — generating and managing the YAML means you can enforce SHA pinning and Dependabot-style updates without asking teams to maintain it manually. Happy to discuss the tradeoffs if anyone's interested.)

by michaelmoreira