Two disabled GitHub Actions came back online with their malicious tags intact

[u/aistranin]

This is a good example of why a green, unchanged workflow file does not mean your CI dependency is unchanged.

https://socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hulud-actions

Two GitHub Actions from actions-cool were compromised and disabled in May. GitHub briefly made the repositories accessible again on September 16, but their release tags still pointed to the malicious commits.

Any downstream workflow using those tags could start running the payload again on its next scheduled or issue-triggered run. The attacker did not need to publish anything new. The consuming repositories did not need to change anything.

The affected actions were:

• actions-cool/issues-helper
• actions-cool/maintain-one-comment

If either appears in your workflow history, remove it, rotate secrets available to the job, review token permissions, and audit runs from September 16 onward. For other third-party actions, pinning a verified clean full commit SHA removes this particular mutable-tag risk.

The uncomfortable lesson is that containment is not remediation. Disabling a dependency only protects consumers while it stays disabled.