“This level of access can be risky if an action is malicious — it could install malware, steal secrets, or make covert changes to your code,” the Orca researchers warn. “The implications of such access can be devastating. Imagine an action that exfiltrates sensitive information or modifies code to introduce subtle bugs or backdoors, potentially affecting all future builds and deployments. In fact, a compromised action can even leverage your GitHub credentials to push malicious changes to other repositories within your organization, amplifying the damage across multiple projects.”

This brings up another important point: It’s not the number of impacted repositories that counts, but their importance and size. Even if an attacker manages to compromise only 10 repositories with this technique, one belonging to a popular project can give the attacker access to thousands of users and organizations down the supply chain.

Mitigation

GitHub does take action against impersonation accounts if brought to its attention, but users shouldn’t rely on that as a defensive technique against typosquatting attacks. Out of the 14 typosquatted organizations that Orca set up for their proof-of-concept, GitHub only suspended one over a three-month period — circelci — and that’s likely because someone reported it. CircleCI is one of the most popular CI/CD platforms.