Recent investigations by Palo Alto Unit 42 and Wiz have revealed that Coinbase was the primary target in a sophisticated GitHub Actions supply chain attack that compromised hundreds of repositories.

## Attack Methodology

The attack began with the compromise of the reviewdog/action-setup@v1 GitHub Action. While the initial breach method remains unclear, attackers modified the action to dump CI/CD secrets and authentication tokens into GitHub Actions logs. When the tj-actions/eslint-changed-files action invoked the compromised reviewdog action, it exposed secrets to workflow logs.

This exposure allowed attackers to steal a Personal Access Token, which they used to push a malicious commit to the tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action. Notably, this initial commit specifically targeted projects from Coinbase and an account named “mmvojwip” (belonging to the attacker).

## Widespread Impact

The changed-files action was used by over 20,000 projects, including Coinbase’s coinbase/agent kit—a popular framework enabling AI agents to interact with blockchains. When Coinbase’s agentkit workflow executed the changed-files actions, attackers gained tokens with write access to the repository.

“The attacker obtained a GitHub token with write permissions to the coinbase/agentkit repository on March 14, 2025, 15:10 UTC, less than two hours before the larger attack was initiated,” explained Unit 42 researchers.

## Limited Success

Despite the sophisticated approach, Coinbase later informed Unit 42 that the attack was unsuccessful and did not impact any of their assets. After failing to compromise Coinbase specifically, the attackers expanded their campaign to all projects using tj-actions/changed-files.

While 23,000 projects utilized the changed-files action, only 218 repositories were ultimately affected by the breach.