richtrGitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability
While GitHub obsess over shoving AI into everything, the rest of the platform is genuinely crumbling and its security flaws are being abused to cause massive damage.
Last week Aqua Security was breached and a few repositories it owns were infected. The threat actors abused widespread use of mutable references in GitHub Actions, which the community has been screaming about for years, to infect potentially thousands of CI runs. They also abused an issue GitHub has acknowledged but refused to fix that allows smuggling malicious Action references into workflows that look harmless.
GHA can’t even be called Swiss cheese anymore, it’s so much worse than that. Major overhauls are needed. The best we’ve got is Immutable Releases which are opt in on a per-repository basis.
Public service announcement
You can pin actions versions to their hash. Some might say this is a best practice for now. It looks like this, where the comment says where the hash is supposed to point.
Old --> uses: actions/checkout@v4
New --> uses: actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 # v4
There is a tool to sweep through your repo and automate this: https://github.com/mheap/pin-github-action
The problem is actions/checkout@11bd71901bbe5b1630ceea73d27597364c9af683 probably doesn’t do this same pinning, and the actions ecosystem is such an intertwined mess that any single compromised action can propagate to the rest
Well, it is a git commit hash of the action repo that contains the transpiled/bundled javascript.
Like: https://github.com/actions/checkout/tree/11bd71901bbe5b1630c...
So I'm pretty sure that for the same commit hash, I'll be executing the same content.
This is true specifically for actions/checkout, but composite actions can have other actions as dependencies, and unless the composite action pins the versions of its dependencies, it is vulnerable for this attack.
This article[0] gives a good overview of the challenges, and also has a link to a concrete attack where this was exploited.
[0]: https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/github-actions-package-manager...
See also pinact[1], gha-update[2], and zizmor's unpinned-uses[3].
The main desiderata with these kinds of action pinning tools is that they (1) leave a tag comment, (2) leave that comment in a format that Dependabot and/or Renovate understands for bumping purposes, and (3) actually put the full tag in the comment, rather than the cutesy short tag that GitHub encourages people to make mutable (v4.x.y instead of v4).
[1]: https://github.com/suzuki-shunsuke/pinact
My preferred tool to solve these issues is called 'gitlab'
yeah, github's business model is not really a git repository but a bunch of other (admittedly useful) stuff that traps people in their ecosystem.