Renovate & Dependabot: The New Malware Delivery System

Supply chain attacks every other morning Unless you've lived under a rock for the last few months, you probably noticed that software supply chain attacks are getting trendy among threat actor groups. Over the last 12 months, we've seen more of those than ever before, to name only a few of them: tj-actions/changed-files : In March 2025, a popular reusable GitHub application workflow was compromised to dump secrets from CI/CD pipelines. Salesloft Drift : In August 2025, threat actors stole OAuth credentials from the compromised Drift chatbot application. Shai-Hulud : In September and November 2025, a wormed attack propagated through npm packages and collected secrets. The common thread among those incidents is that they all revolved around secrets, one way or another. Some used secrets as an initial access vector, and others were focused on collecting secrets from victim environments. March 2026 did not change the state of things, with two new severe attacks added to our dreadful collection: trivy-action & LiteLLM campaign by Team PCP. The most popular Axios package compromise. Both those attacks followed a now-classical pattern, spreading through compromised open-source dependencies to maximise the impact in the shortest possible time. Your all-time classic, now with added internal threats Open-source supply chain attacks are not new. Ever since we started using centralized open-source package registries, the risk has existed. Threat actors understood this and started exploiting it. What has changed since 2015 is how we have improved software development productivity through automation. And now, this very same automation that lets you test and build your projects without typing a single command is amplifying the supply-chain threat and the velocity of attacks. Let's see how. Keeping your malware up to date A very concerning pattern we've observed in the trivy-action and Axios campaigns is that automation can become the source of your compromise. One thing no develop