Credential-Stealing Workflows Hit Hundreds of Code Repositories After Maintainer Accounts Hijacked

Researchers have disclosed an ongoing credential-theft campaign that compromised two high-profile open-source maintainer accounts and used them to push a malicious workflow into more than 340 repositories. StepSecurity reported that the account of Takashi Kitao, author of the game engine pyxel, was used to push the workflow to 27 repositories. About eight hours later, the account of Henry Wu, original author of Uber's athenadriver, was used to push it to 318 repositories in a 16-minute window.

As of October 9, 2026, Socket said it had identified more than 500 GitHub accounts that committed the malicious workflow to tens of thousands of repositories since October 7, 2026. The activity has been attributed to GhostAction, a supply chain campaign first disclosed in September 2025. That earlier wave affected 817 repositories across 327 GitHub users and led to the theft of 3,325 secrets, including PyPI, npm and DockerHub tokens.

The workflows are named Security Audit or GitHub Actions Security, and are designed to send sensitive data to a hard-coded IP address over plain HTTP. The stolen data includes named GitHub Actions secrets, plus cloud, AI and SaaS credentials found in the working tree and the full git history. Examples include AWS keys, Anthropic, OpenAI and OpenRouter API keys, and GitHub and GitLab tokens. This article covers only the opening of the original report.