CYBERSECURITYMarch 11, 20261 min read20 views

Five Malicious Rust Crates and AI Bot Exploit CI/CD Pipelines to Steal Developer Secrets

Cybersecurity researchers have identified five malicious Rust crates and an AI-powered bot targeting CI/CD pipelines to exfiltrate sensitive developer secrets and .env files.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered five malicious Rust crates that masquerade as time-related utilities to transmit .env file data to the threat actors. The Rust packages, published to crates.io, include chrono_anchor, dnp3times, time_calibrator, time_calibrators, and time-sync. These crates impersonate timeapi.io and were published between late February and early March 2026. While posing as local time utilities, their core behavior is credential and secret theft, specifically targeting .env files in developer environments.

In a related development, an automated attack campaign using an AI-powered bot called 'hackerbot-claw' has been targeting CI/CD pipelines. The bot scans public repositories for exploitable GitHub Actions workflows to harvest developer secrets. It targeted major repositories belonging to Microsoft, Datadog, and Aqua Security. In the case of Aqua Security's Trivy, the attacker managed to push a malicious VS Code extension that leveraged local AI coding agents (like Claude and GitHub Copilot) to exfiltrate sensitive system information. The incident is tracked as CVE-2026-28353. Users are advised to rotate keys, audit CI/CD jobs, and limit outbound network access.

Source: The Hacker News

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