Compromised trivy-action GitHub Action Steals Credentials

On March 19, 2026, CrowdStrike discovered a supply chain compromise affecting the aquasecurity/trivy-action GitHub Action, a popular open-source vulnerability scanner used in CI/CD pipelines. The attack involved retroactively poisoning 76 of the 77 release tags via git tag repointing, replacing the legitimate entry point with a multi-stage credential stealer. The malicious code was designed to run silently before the real scanner, allowing workflows to complete normally and evade initial detection. Aqua Security has confirmed the compromise and removed the malicious artifacts. This incident highlights the risk associated with mutable tags in Git and the potential for supply chain attacks in CI/CD environments.

Attack Chain

1. An attacker gains write access to the aquasecurity/trivy-action repository.
2. The attacker repoints existing git tags (e.g., 0.24.0) to malicious commits.
3. A developer's CI/CD pipeline references the compromised trivy-action via a poisoned tag.
4. The GitHub Actions runner downloads the malicious action from GitHub and extracts it.
5. The runner executes the malicious entrypoint.sh script, which begins with credential-stealing code.
6. The malicious script enumerates process IDs (PIDs).
7. The script proceeds with multi-stage credential theft.
8. The script executes the legitimate Trivy scanner to mask malicious activity.

Impact

The compromise of the aquasecurity/trivy-action GitHub Action potentially impacted numerous organizations using the scanner in their CI/CD pipelines. Successful exploitation results in the theft of secrets, API keys, deploy tokens, cloud credentials, and other sensitive information stored within the GitHub Actions runner environment. This stolen information could be used for unauthorized access to internal infrastructure, data exfiltration, or further malicious activities. The exact number of affected organizations remains unknown.

Recommendation

• Deploy the Sigma rule "Detect Trivy Action Compromise - Suspicious Script Execution" to detect malicious script execution within the GitHub Actions runner environment.
• Review CI/CD pipeline configurations to identify and audit usage of the aquasecurity/trivy-action.
• Monitor process execution on GitHub Actions runners for unusual or unexpected activity.
• Implement stricter controls on write access to GitHub repositories and actions to prevent future compromises.