blog: ghost action

docs/blog/posts/2025-09-16-github-actions-token-exfiltration.md

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+---
+title: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows
+description: Incident report of a recent attack campaign targeting GitHub Actions workflows to exfiltrate PyPI tokens, our response, and steps to protect your projects.
+authors:
+  - miketheman
+date: 2025-09-16
+tags:
+  - security
+  - transparency
+---
+
+## Summary
+
+I recently responded to an attack campaign where malicious actors injected code into GitHub Actions workflows 
+attempting to steal PyPI publishing tokens.
+PyPI was not compromised, and no PyPI packages were published by the attackers.
+
+Attackers targeted a wide variety of repositories, many of which had PyPI tokens stored as GitHub secrets,
+modifying their workflows to send those tokens to external servers.
+While the attackers successfully exfiltrated some tokens, they do not appear to have used them on PyPI.
+
+I've invalidated all affected tokens and notified the impacted project maintainers.
+If you're one of them, I have emailed you from <security@pypi.org>.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+You can read more about the details of the attack on [GitGuardian's blog](https://blog.gitguardian.com/ghostaction-campaign-3-325-secrets-stolen/).
+
+## Timeline and Response
+
+On September 5th, a GitGuardian employee used the [PyPI "Report as malware" button](./2024-03-06-malware-reporting-evolved.md)
+to submit their findings for a project named `fastuuid` - namely they found a malicious GitHub Actions workflow 
+attempting to exfiltrate PyPI tokens to a remote server.
+No compromise on PyPI was found, tokens relating to the user accounts were invalidated,
+and I reached out to the project owners to notify and help secure the account and project.
+
+Later on September 5th, another researcher from GitGuardian emailed PyPI Security 
+directly about their current findings, effectively an expansion of the previous attack.
+Due to some of the contents in that email, it ended up in our inbound Spam folder,
+delaying response until September 10th when I became aware of the attack via other channels,
+and found the original email in the Spam folder.
+I may follow up with our support system provider to see about improving spam filtering rules.
+
+After triaging the situation, I discovered another Indicator of Compromise (IoC) in the form of a URL,
+which I shared with GitGuardian to assist with their ongoing investigation.
+
+Over the course of the following few days, I reviewed the findings from the researchers.
+I observed that many of the project maintainers responded to notifications from the researchers on their open source issue trackers,
+either reverting the changes to their actions workflows,
+or removing the affected workflows entirely from history via force-push of the repository.
+Many of the maintainers also proactively rotated their PyPI tokens.
+
+After confirming that no PyPI accounts had been compromised,
+on September 15th I reached out to the maintainers of the affected projects to notify them of the situation,
+to let them know that their tokens had been invalidated,
+and recommend using [Trusted Publishers](https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/) 
+with GitHub Actions to help protect their projects in the future.
+
+## What You Can Do
+
+If you use GitHub Actions to publish to PyPI, I recommend the following steps to protect your projects:
+
+1. Replace long-lived tokens with [Trusted Publishers](https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/.
+   This is the most effective way to protect your projects from this type of attack.
+   GitHub Trusted Publishers use short-lived tokens that are scoped to a specific repository,
+   and expire after a short period of time.
+2. Log into your account and review your security history for any suspicious activity.
+   You can do this by going to your [Account Settings](https://pypi.org/manage/account/)
+   and scrolling to the ["Security History" section](https://pypi.org/manage/account/#account-events).
+
+While Trusted Publisher tokens can still be exfiltrated,
+using Trusted Publishers significantly reduces the risk of compromise.
+
+## Acknowledgements
+
+Thanks to Charles Brossollet, Guillaume Valadon, and Gaëtan Ferry
+of [GitGuardian](https://www.gitguardian.com/) for their collaboration on this issue.
+
+This investigation and incident response is made possible by the generosity of individuals and corporations
+supporting critical security efforts to better secure the Python community,
+with thanks to [Alpha-Omega](https://alpha-omega.dev/).
+
+Support these efforts and more here: <https://www.python.org/sponsors/application/>