A malicious npm package named “@acitons/artifact” was found impersonating the legitimate “@actions/artifact” module, directly targeting the CI/CD pipelines within GitHub Actions workflows.
According to Veracode findings, the package was uploaded on November 7 and was designed to trigger during the build process of GitHub-owned repositories. Once executed inside a CI/CD runner, the payload captures any tokens available to that build environment and then uses those credentials to publish malicious artifacts–effectively impersonating GitHub itself.
“This incident isn’t just about a malicious npm package, it is about the blind trust many organizations place in the modern supply chain,” said Randolph Barr, CISO at Cequence Security. “Most organizations focus their controls on runtime environments, yet the CI/CD pipeline often runs with higher privilege than any developer. A single typosquatted dependency can silently execute code during a build, access repository tokens, and impersonate an organization, just as this attack attempted to do with GitHub’s own repositories.“
