Novee Security discloses Cordyceps flaw class leaving over 300 GitHub Actions repos fully exploitable
A free GitHub account was enough to hijack build pipelines at Microsoft $MSFT, Google, Apache and Cloudflare $NET. Novee Security verified over 300 of 30,000 scanned repos as fully exploitable via the Cordyceps CI/CD flaw class. Dozens of organizations have confirmed fixes.
Organizations that build software through GitHub Actions are exposed to a newly documented class of supply chain vulnerabilities, and the barrier to exploitation is a free GitHub account. Researchers at Novee Security scanned roughly 30,000 high-impact open-source repositories and documented a class of CI/CD weaknesses they call Cordyceps: command injection, broken authentication logic, artifact poisoning chains and privilege escalation inside GitHub Actions workflows. A single scan flagged 654 projects, and the team verified more than 300 as fully exploitable. Affected build tooling included projects published by Microsoft $MSFT, Google, Apache, Cloudflare $NET and the Python Software Foundation. Two confirmed findings show the reach. In Microsoft's Azure Sentinel repository, an anonymous comment on a pull request could trigger code execution and expose a non-expiring GitHub App key with write access to security content distributed to customer workspaces. In Google's AI Agent Development Kit sample repository, a single malicious pull request was shown to grant owner-level roles on the associated Google Cloud project. The exposure does not stop at the maintainers who patch. Enterprises that consume these open-source projects pull in build artifacts produced by the affected pipelines, so a compromised workflow upstream lands in downstream software without any action by the victim. Novee Security says dozens of organizations have confirmed fixes. Source: Novee Security research, reported by BleepingComputer and Dark Reading.