Two GitHub Actions associated with the Mini Shai-Hulud supply-chain campaign were disabled again after briefly becoming available in mid-September, according to security researchers. The affected repositories, actions-cool/issues-helper and actions-cool/maintain-one-comment, had previously been taken offline following a compromise in May 2026.
Security firm Socket said the repositories reappeared on September 16 with malicious release tags still intact. As a result, projects that referenced the Actions through mutable version tags could have downloaded and run the malicious workflow code during their next scheduled or event-triggered CI/CD execution.
The repositories are now displaying GitHub's notice stating that access has been disabled by staff for a terms-of-service violation. It is not clear why the repositories became accessible again or how long they remained available.
Existing tags created renewed exposure
The original compromise reportedly inserted code designed to collect credentials and other secrets available to GitHub Actions workflows, then send them to attacker-controlled infrastructure. Researchers linked the activity to the Mini Shai-Hulud cluster based on overlap with an exfiltration domain also observed in compromised npm packages tied to the @antv ecosystem.
The incident illustrates a risk associated with using tags such as @v2 or @v2.2.1 to reference third-party Actions. Unlike an immutable commit identifier, a tag can point to altered code or become available again after an upstream repository is restored. No edits to downstream workflow files were required for affected projects to execute the previously planted payload.
These Actions are commonly used for issue-management tasks, including handling inactive issues and maintaining bot comments. Such workflows may run daily or whenever issues and pull requests are opened, potentially making any renewed exposure rapid and widespread among users of the Actions.
Recommended response
- Identify all workflow references to the affected Actions, including actions-cool/issues-helper@v2.2.1.
- Remove the dependencies where possible, or replace them with a verified clean commit SHA created before May 18, 2026.
- Rotate secrets that may have been exposed to affected workflow runs.
- Review Actions logs for successful runs after extended failures or inactivity.
- Examine repository and workflow history for unexpected changes following September 16.
Workflows already pinned to a known-clean full commit SHA from before the May compromise are not believed to be affected by the repository's temporary return.