Malicious Trivy GitHub Actions releases trigger CI secret rotation

TL;DR — Ensure you are on trivy v0.69.3, trivy-action v0.35.0, and setup-trivy v0.2.6; if you ran compromised releases, rotate all pipeline secrets and block the listed C2.

What happened

Aqua Security posted an incident notice stating that, on March 19, 2026, a threat actor used a compromised credential to publish malicious releases of Trivy (v0.69.4) and the GitHub Actions trivy-action and setup-trivy.

Aqua says their containment of an earlier incident was incomplete: secrets/tokens were rotated, but the rotation "wasn't atomic" and the attacker "may have been privy to refreshed tokens," enabling follow-on authenticated changes.

This matters because CI/CD runners often have broad access (repository tokens, cloud credentials, signing keys). When a widely reused GitHub Action is compromised, the blast radius is downstream and immediate — it turns “security scanning” steps into an execution path for attacker code in your build environment.

Who is impacted

• Any GitHub Actions workflow using aquasecurity/trivy-action and/or aquasecurity/setup-trivy that executed during the window when the malicious releases/tags were live.
• Any automation that pulled Trivy v0.69.4 from impacted channels/registries.
• Organizations whose CI/CD secrets were available to those workflows (e.g., GITHUB_TOKEN, cloud credentials, registry creds, signing material).

What to do now

• Follow Aqua’s immediate action items:

  "An as immediate and urgent action item, ensure you are using the latest safe releases:

  • trivy v0.69.3
  • trivy-action v0.35.0
  • setup-trivy v0.2.6 If you suspect you were running a compromised version, treat all pipeline secrets as compromised and rotate immediately. We also recommend that you block the C2 domain scan[.]aquasecurtiy[.]org and IP 45.148.10.212 at your network perimeter."

• Identify where you use the actions and upgrade workflow references (search your org for uses: aquasecurity/trivy-action@ and uses: aquasecurity/setup-trivy@).
• Rotate credentials that were accessible to impacted jobs (CI secrets, cloud keys, deploy tokens, registry credentials) and review CI logs for suspicious outbound connections matching the C2 indicators.
• After upgrading, pin GitHub Actions to immutable commit SHAs (not mutable tags) to reduce exposure to future tag/release retargeting incidents.