Two Compromised GitHub Tools Were Switched Back on With the Malware Still Inside
Two GitHub Actions that the platform had disabled in May for carrying malware became reachable again on Sept. 16, 2026 with their release tags still pointing at that code, and stayed reachable for nine days. The supply-chain security firm Socket, which found the reopening and published it on Sept. 24, says GitHub disabled both a second time on Sept. 25.
The two are actions-cool/issues-helper and actions-cool/maintain-one-comment, small tools that automate issue and comment housekeeping. Any workflow calling either one by version tag, rather than by a fixed commit, downloaded and ran the old code again on its next run. Socket notes that such workflows usually run on a daily schedule or on each new issue, so most affected projects probably ran it within a day.
Nothing new was published. Socket's account is that the code had sat in both repositories since May, that the tags were never cleaned up, and that the only change was that the repositories could be downloaded again.
GitHub's dependency graph lists about 15,000 repositories as dependents of issues-helper alone, a figure Socket reports from the graph. That is a count of projects that list the action, not a count of projects that were hit. Socket says it has not determined how many of those dependents reference the action by a movable tag instead of a pinned commit.
Socket's guidance to maintainers is to search their own repositories' workflow files for both action names, treat any tag reference as affected, and either drop the action or pin it to the full commit hash of a release verified to predate May 18, 2026. Any workflow that ran a tag reference on or after Sept. 16 should have every secret it could reach rotated, and its history checked from that date for commits nobody can account for.
Why the repositories were switched back on is not established. Socket says it could not determine the reason and offers a request from the legitimate maintainers as one unconfirmed possibility. GitHub has published no account of the re-enablement.
