A threat actor dubbed Gheist is turning compromised GitHub accounts into credential-harvesting platforms. By planting malicious GitHub Actions workflows in private repositories, attackers can expose repository and environment secrets, then retrieve them through GitHub APIs before deleting evidence of the activity.
Tracked since September 15 by Wiz Research, the campaign has left more than 13,500 malicious branches across over 850 compromised accounts, spanning personal projects and private enterprise repositories.
The campaign’s weapon is GitHub Actions, the platform’s automation service, which attackers are using to turn stolen access into harvested credentials. The automation creates a branch, adds a workflow named “sync-check” that attempts to print secrets into execution logs, retrieves those logs through the GitHub API, and deletes the workflow run seconds later.
