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

This article covers the discovery of five malicious Rust crates on crates.io and an AI-powered bot campaign that targeted CI/CD pipelines to steal developer secrets.

• •Five Rust packages (chrono_anchor, dnp3times, time_calibrator, time_calibrators, time-sync) masqueraded as time utilities to exfiltrate .env files containing API keys and tokens to attacker-controlled infrastructure.
• •The most sophisticated crate, chrono_anchor, hid exfiltration logic inside a file named guard.rs invoked via an 'optional sync' helper to avoid detection, and triggers on every CI run rather than establishing persistence.
• •An AI-powered GitHub bot called hackerbot-claw scanned public repositories for misconfigured GitHub Actions workflows, forked targets, and opened PRs with hidden payloads to harvest secrets from CI pipelines.
• •The bot compromised the Aqua Security Trivy VS Code extension (versions 1.8.12 and 1.8.13), injecting logic that invoked local AI coding agents (Claude, Codex, Gemini, Copilot CL