GhostAction shows workflow write access is secret read access

Analysis of the GhostAction campaign shows that the ability to edit a workflow file effectively grants read access to every secret that workflow can reach. On 8 October 2026, two compromised maintainer accounts pushed a malicious security-audit.yml straight to default branches in 345 repositories with no review.

• The injected workflow scanned for 13 credential patterns and swept full git history
• Findings were sent in a single HTTP POST to a hard-coded IP address
• In uber/athenadriver the token was read-only, yet the collector still acknowledged receipt
• GitHub began blocking the workflow on 9 October; later waves extracted no secrets