Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem
99 comments
·December 14, 2025snickerbockers
deepsun
Same thing with IDE plugins. At least some are full-featured by the manufacturer, but I couldn't get on with VS Code as for every small feature I had to install some random plugin (even if popular, but still developed by who-knows-who).
willvarfar
The amount of browser extension authors who have talked openly about being approached to sell their extension or insert malicious code is many, and presumably many others have taken the money and not told us about it. It seems likely there are IDE extensions doing or going to do the same thing...
majormajor
> Running npm install is not negligence. Installing dependencies is not a security failure. The security failure is in an ecosystem that allows packages to run arbitrary code silently.
This is wildly circular logic!
"One person using these tools isn't bad security practice, the problem is that EVERYONE ELSE ["the ecosystem"] uses these tools and doesn't have higher standards!"
It should be no shock to anyone at this point that huge chunks of common developer tools have very poor security profiles. We've seen stories like this many times.
If you care, you need to actually care!
LtWorf
> Also the OP seemingly implies credentials are stored on-filesystem in plaintext but I might be extrapolating too much there.
Doesn't really matter, if the agent is unlocked they can be accessed.
johncolanduoni
This is not strictly true - most OS keychain stores have methods of authenticating the requesting application before remitting keys (signatures, non-user-writable paths, etc.), even if its running as the correct user. That said, it requires careful design on the part of the application (and its install process) to not allow a non-elevated application to overwrite some part of the trusted application and get the keys anyway. macOS has the best system here in principle with its bundle signing, but most developer tools are not in bundles so its of limited utility in this circumstance.
elif
It wasn't in their product. It was just on a devs machine
hnlmorg
I think the OP is aware of that and I agree with them that it’s bad practice despite how common it is.
For example with AWS, you can use the AWS CLI to sign you in and that goes through the HTTPS auth flow to provide you with temporary access keys. Which means:
1. You don’t have any access keys in plain text
2. Even if your env vars are also stolen, those AWS keys expire within a few hours anyway.
If the cloud service you’re using doesn’t support OIDC or any other ephemeral access keys, then you should store them encrypted. There’s numerous ways you can do this, from password managers to just using PGP/GPG directly. Just make sure you aren’t pasting them into your shell otherwise you’ll then have those keys in plain text in your .history file.
I will agree that It does take effort to get your cloud credentials set up in a convenient way (easy to access, but without those access keys in plain text). But if you’re doing cloud stuff professionally, like the devs in the article, then you really should learn how to use these tools.
cyberax
> 1. You don’t have any access keys in plain text
That's not correct. The (ephemeral) keys are still available. Just do `aws configure export-credentials --profile <YOUR_OIDC_PROFILE>`
Sure, they'll likely expire in 1-24 hours, but that can be more than enough for the attacker.
You also can try to limit the impact of the credentials by adding IP restrictions to the assumed role, but then the attacker can just proxy their requests through your machine.
robomc
> If the cloud service you’re using doesn’t support OIDC or any other ephemeral access keys, then you should store them encrypted. There’s numerous ways you can do this, from password managers to just using PGP/GPG directly. Just make sure you aren’t pasting them into your shell otherwise you’ll then have those keys in plain text in your .history file.
This doesn't really help though, for a supply chain attack, because you're still going to need to decrypt those keys for your code to read at some point, and the attacker has visibility on that, right?
Like the shell isn't the only thing the attacker has access to, they also have access to variables set in your code.
marifjeren
> """ I'm strongly in favor of blocking post-install scripts by default. :+1: This is a change that will have a painful adjustment period for our users, but I believe in ~1 year everyone will look back and be thankful we made it. It's nuts that a [pnpm|yarn|npm] install can run arbitrary code in the first place. """
- a pnpm maintainer 1 year ago
KomoD
> stored in our database which was not compromised
Personally I don't really agree with "was not compromised"
You say yourself that the guy had access to your secrets and AWS, I'd definitely consider that compromised even if the guy (to your knowledge) didn't read anything from the database. Assume breach if access was possible.
nsonha
There are logs for accessing aws resources and if you don't see the access before you revoke it then the data is safe
MrDarcy
Unless the attacker used any one of hundreds of other avenues to access the AWS resource.
Are you sure they didn’t get a service account token from some other service then use that to access customer data?
I’ve never seen anyone claim in writing all permutations are exhaustively checked in the audit logs.
otterley
It depends on what kind of access we're talking about. If we're talking about AWS resource mutations, one can trust CloudTrail to accurately log those actions. CloudTrail can also log data plane events, though you have to turn it on, and it costs extra. Similarly, RDS access logging is pretty trustworthy, though functionality varies by engine.
johncolanduoni
Ideally you should have a clear audit log of all developer actions that access production resources, and clear records of custody over any shared production credentials (e.g. you should be able to show the database password used by service A is not available outside of it, and that no malicious code was deployed to service A). A lot of places don't do this, of course, but often you can come up with a pretty good circumstantial case that it was unlikely that exfiltration occurred over the time range in question.
progbits
Very offtopic but this caught my eye:
> Total repos cloned: 669
How big is this company? All the numbers I can find online suggest well below 100 people, and yet they have over 600 repos? Is that normal?
rsyring
My org is currently at 7 people and we have 365 repositories associated with our github org. We've been around for a number of years and I'd guess that impacts the number of repos more than the number of team members.
LtWorf
If they have an architect that loves microservices and thinks every microservice needs its own repo that's what happens (insanity).
Rafert
> This is one of the frustrating realities of these attacks: once the malware runs, identifying the source becomes extremely difficult. The package doesn't announce itself. The pnpm install completes successfully. Everything looks normal.
Sounds like there’s no EDR running on the dev machines? You should have more to investigate if Sentinel One/CrowdStrike/etc were running.
zozos
I have been thinking about this. How do I make my git setup on my laptop secure? Currently, I have my ssh key on the laptop, so if I want to push, I just use git push. And I have admin credentials for the org. How do I make it more secure?
0xbadcafebee
1) Get 1Password, 2) use 1Password to hold all your SSH keys and authorize SSH access [1], 3) use 1Password to sign your Git commits and set up your remote VCS to validate them [2], 4) use GitHub OAuth [3] or the GitHub CLI's Login with HTTPS [4] to do repository push/pull. If you don't like 1Password, use BitWarden.
With this setup there are two different SSH keys, one for access to GitHub, one is a commit signing key, but you don't use either to push/pull to GitHub, you use OAuth (over HTTPS). This combination provides the most security (without hardware tokens) and 1Password and the OAuth apps make it seamless.
Do not use a user with admin credentials for day to day tasks, make that a separate user in 1Password. This way if your regular account gets compromised the attacker will not have admin credentials.
[1] https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/agent/ [2] https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/git-commit-signing/ [3] https://github.com/hickford/git-credential-oauth [4] https://cli.github.com/manual/gh_auth_login
zozos
I already use 1password and have it already installed. Will try this out. Thanks!
anthonyryan1
One approach I started using a could of years ago was storing SSH private keys in the TPM, and using it via PKCS11 in SSH agent.
One benefit of Microsoft requiring them for Windows 11 support is that nearly every recent computer has a TPM, either hardware or emulated by the CPU firmware.
It guarantees that the private key can never be exfiltrated or copied. But it doesn't stop malicious software on your machine from doing bad things from your machine.
So I'm not certain how much protection it really offers on this scenario.
Linux example: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module/SSH
macOS example (I haven't tested personally): https://gist.github.com/arianvp/5f59f1783e3eaf1a2d4cd8e952bb...
homebrewer
Or use a FIDO token to protect your SSH key, which becomes useless without the hardware token.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SSH_keys#FIDO/U2F
That's what I do. For those of us too lazy to read the article, tl;dr:
ssh-keygen -t ed25519-sk
ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk
Use the ssh key as usual. OpenSSH will ask you to tap the token every time you use it: silent git pushes without you confirming it by tapping the token become impossible. Extracting the key from your machine does nothing — it's useless without the hardware token.
mshroyer
Not a perfect defense, but sufficient to make your key much harder to exploit: Use a Yubikey (or similar) resident SSH key, with the Yubikey configured to require a touch for each authentication request.
mr_mitm
There is no defense against a compromised laptop. You should prevent this at all cost.
You can make it a bit more challenging for the attacker by using secure enclaves (like TPM or Yubikey), enforce signed commits, etc. but if someone compromised your machine, they can do whatever you can.
Enforcing signing off on commits by multiple people is probably your only bet. But if you have admin creds, an attacker can turn that off, too. So depending on your paranoia level and risk appetite, you need a dedicated machine for admin actions.
otterley
It's more nuanced than that. Modern OSes and applications can, and often do, require re-authentication before proceeding with sensitive actions. I can't just run `sudo` without re-authenticating myself; and my ssh agent will reauthenticate me as well. See, e.g., https://developer.1password.com/docs/ssh/agent/security
mr_mitm
The malware can wait until you authenticate and perform its actions then in the context of your user session. The malware can also hijack your PATH variable and replace sudo with a wrapper that includes malicious commands.
It can also just get lucky and perform a 'git push' while your SSH agent happens to be unlocked. We don't want to rely on luck here.
Really, it's pointless. Unless you are signing specific actions from an independent piece of hardware [1], the malware can do what you can do. We can talk about the details all day long, and you can make it a bit harder for autonomously acting malware, but at the end of the day it's just a finger exercise to do what they want to do after they compromised your machine.
[1] https://www.reiner-sct.com/en/tan-generators/tan-generator-f... (Note that a display is required so you can see what specific action you are actually signing, in this case it shows amount and recipient bank account number.)
noman-land
You can add a gpg key and subkeys to a yubikey and use gpg-agent instead of ssh-agent for ssh auth. When you commit or push, it asks you for a pin for the yubikey to unlock it.
larusso
1 store my ssh key in 1Password and use the 1Password ssh agent. This agents asks for access to the key(s) with Touch ID. Either for each access or for each session etc. one can also whitelist programs but I think this all reduces the security.
larusso
There is the FIDO feature which means you don’t need to hackle with gpg at all. You can even use an ssh key as signing key to add another layer of security on the GitHub side by only allowing signed commits.
esseph
You can put the ssh privkey on the yubikey itself and protect it with a pin.
You can also just generate new ssh keys and protect them with a pin.
benoau
You can set up your repo to disable pushing directly to branches like main and require MFA to use the org admin account, so something malicious would need to push to a benign branch and separately be merged into one that deploys come from.
sallveburrpi
Pushing directly to main seems crazy - for anything that is remotely important I would use a pull request/merge request pattern
otterley
There's nothing wrong with pushing to main, as long as you don't blindly treat the head of the main branch as production-ready. It's a branch like any other; Git doesn't care what its name is.
esseph
Depends on the use case of the repo.
t0mas88
But the attacker could just create a branch, merge request and then merge that?
benoau
They can't with git by itself, but if you're also signed in to GitHub or BitBucket's CLI with an account able to approve merges they could use those tools.
x0x0
We require review on PRs before they can be merged.
madeofpalk
I’ve started to get more and more paranoid about this. It’s tough when you’re running untrusted code, but I think I’ve improved this by:
not storing SSH keys on the filesystem, and instead using an agent (like 1Password) to mediate access
Stop storing dev secrets/credentials on the filesystem, injecting them into processes with env vars or other mechanisms. Your password manager could have a way to do this.
Develop in a VM separate from your regular computer usage. On windows this is essential anyway through using WSL, but similar things exist for other OSs
benfrancom
If github, take a look at gh cli or git credential manager:
https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/git-basics/caching-yo...
progbits
I wouldn't say that's better. Now your .config directory contains a github token that can do more than just repo pull/push, and it is trivially exfiltrated. Though similar thing could be said for browser cookies.
moh_quz
Really appreciate the transparency here. Post-mortems like this are vital for the industry.
I'm curious was the exfiltration traffic distinguishable from normal developer traffic?
We've been looking into stricter egress filtering for our dev environments, but it's always a battle between security and breaking npm install
robinhoodexe
Wouldn’t the IP allowlist feature on the GitHub organisation work wonders for this kind of attack?
sync
That’s weird, pnpm no longer automatically runs lifecycle scripts like preinstall [1], so unless they were running a very old version of pnpm, shouldn’t they have been protected from Shai-Hulud?
ItsHarper
At the end of the article, they talk about how they've since updated to the latest major version of pnpm, which is the one with that change
e40
Yeah, I thought that was the main reason to use pnpm. Very confused.
agilob
Let me understand it fully. That means they updated dependencies using old, out of date package manager. If pnpm was up to date, this would no have happened? Sounds totally like their fault then
pverheggen
Maybe the project itself had a postinstall script? It doesn't run lifecycle scripts of dependencies, but it still runs project-level ones.
Yasuraka
> Running npm install is not negligence.
I beg to differ and look forward to running my own fiefdom where interpreter/JIT languages are banned in all forms.
staticassertion
It has nothing to do with interpreters or JIT, it has nothing to do with npm at all. All package managers have the insane security model of "arbitrary code execution with no constraints".
seniorsassycat
I tend to agree but think npms post install hook is a degree worse. Triggering during install, silently because npm didn't like someone using the feature to ask for donations, is worse than requiring you to load and run the package code.
bspammer
Given that all the stolen credentials were made public, I was hoping that someone would build a haveibeenpwned style site. We know we were compromised on at least a few tokens, but it would be nice to be able to search using a compromised token to find out what else leaked. We’ve rotated everything we could think of but not knowing if we’ve missed something sucks.
ramimac
Reach out if you'd like me to check - I did the same for the trigger.dev team in fact[1].
(personal site linked in bio, who links you onward to my linkedin)
[1] https://x.com/ramimacisabird/status/1994598075520749640?s=20
KomoD
Doesn't it publish the repos to your Github account? Just clone and look at what was stolen.
solrith
On the follow up Wiz blog they suggested that the exfiltration was cross-victim https://www.wiz.io/blog/shai-hulud-2-0-aftermath-ongoing-sup...
bspammer
As the sibling comment said, the worm used stolen GitHub credentials from other victims, and randomly distributed the uploads between victims.
Also everything was double base64 encoded which makes it impossible to use GitHub search.
Etheryte
The approach the attacker took makes little sense to me, perhaps someone else has an explanation for it? At first they monitored what's going on and then silently exfiltrated credentials and private repos. Makes sense so far. But then why make so much noise with trying to force push repositories? It's Git, surely there's a clone of nearly everything on most dev machines etc.
chuckadams
Malware sometimes suffers from feature creep too.
null
solrith
The Torvalds commits were a common post infection signature, common in the random repos that published secrets (Microsoft documented https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/12/09/sha...)
It was a really noisy worm though, and it looked like a few actors also jumped on the exposed credentials making private repos public and modifying readmes promoting a startup/discord.
>Running npm install is not negligence. Installing dependencies is not a security failure. The security failure is in an ecosystem that allows packages to run arbitrary code silently.
No, your security failure is that you use a package manager that allows third-parties push arbitrary code into your product with no oversight. You only have "secutity" to the extent that you can trust the people who control those packages to act both competently and in good faith ad infinitum.
Also the OP seemingly implies credentials are stored on-filesystem in plaintext but I might be extrapolating too much there.