alt Hacker NewsPlease, someone explain how it's possible to add obfuscated file to so many repositories? Do they don't have any code reviews?
Also, the title is misleading, setup adds config to be auto executed by people who work on the repo. They would have to use vscode/cursor/claude/gemini. People who use codex / opencode / other harnesses are safe I guess.
Details: https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/miasma-worm-hits-microsoft-...
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Many of the malicious commits show as an author `github-actions <[email protected]>`. Which means that they are authenticating as internal github CI/CD stuff and that there are so many of those that no possible automated tool can find the poison in the mountain of chaff.
So this is related to the Sept 2025 security breach of Github.
> The five repos carry 1,459 GitHub stars between them, mantine-datatable alone accounting for 1,225. Stars are a rough proxy for how many developers have the source checked out locally, which is the population this attack targets.
> Every commit: unsigned, github-actions identity, chore: update dependencies [skip ci], the same six-file footprint. A 49-second sweep across five repos is automation, not a human committing. This matches Shai-Hulud self-propagation: harvest a GitHub token with write access from a prior infection, then push the persistence payload into every repo the token can reach.
https://safedep.io/miasma-worm-ai-coding-agent-config-inject...
What it is doing: https://safedep.io/config-files-that-run-code/
I'm not related to those guys. That's the simplest detailed explanation of what is happening that I've found.
Coworker seriously asked "since we're generating most of our code now, who is actually reading all of the code?" We're at a small company, but the urge to trust The Oracle is almost spiritual with some people IMHO.
I read 90%+ of the code I generate by reviewing it like I would a junior developer. I'm heavily vibe-coding a new feature right now and it's going to get a thorough reading as soon as GitHub's PRs start working again
if an account with the ability to push to the repo was taken over, there wouldn't be any PR review.
> Do they don't have any code reviews?
I have a good friend that works for one of the giants(I can't say which one for obvious reasons but S&P 500). He's been working there for quite a while now, so far he hasn't seen what the project he works on looks like, has the repo cloned and knows what language is used but nothing beyond that. Everything is slopped together. His project is the authentication and authorization system for all the company products. In his own words "I hit Tab all day long and write 'this is intended' in the reviews, which are all ai, there is no human in the loop. This is what we are told to do by the CEO and CTO unironically. If something breaks, no one knows how any of this works since no one has seen the actual code. Our performance reviews are based on how many tokens we've used, not what we have done". I suspect this is the case in many companies now so it's not unreasonable to think that there are no actual code reviews.