Most repos hit by the Shai-Hulud worm are still infected a week later, and the obvious fix punishes the victims.

This is a follow-up to my earlier posts, and it is more of an open question than an answer. I have the data, I have a way to act, and I am genuinely unsure that acting is the right call. I could use the community's help thinking it through. Last week a supply-chain worm got into my GitHub account and repositories. I got out, cleaned up the proper way, and wrote it up. Then I checked the public list of repositories hit by the same worm, to see how the cleanup was going across the ecosystem. Nearly a week later, most of them are still carrying the live payload. It is worse than a count When you look closely, a lot of the owners are clearly trying. But they are missing how this actually works, in two ways that matter: Deleting is not removing. They remove the malicious files with an ordinary commit. That takes the payload off the branch tip, but the commit that introduced it is still in history, and the blob is still recoverable by anyone who reverts or checks out the old commit. The only real removal is rewriting history (reset, not revert) and asking GitHub to purge the objects, because the fork network keeps them reachable by SHA. One branch is not all branches. They clean the branch they know about and never see the backdated copies the worm planted on other branches, which are still live. And the part that genuinely worries me: some of these owners are almost certainly opening the infected repository in VS Code or an AI assistant to fix it , which is exactly the trigger that runs the payload again. The act of trying to clean it can re-detonate it. So: a large number of repositories still carrying a live credential stealer, and a large number of owners and contributors who do not know they are still exposed. The dilemma Here is where I am stuck. There are two paths and I do not like either. Report them to GitHub. Their response is automated and blunt. The repo gets disabled, with no human in the loop, the same hands-off automation that locked me out of my own accou