{"id":241323,"date":"2026-07-22T09:52:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T14:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/fakegit-campaign-uses-7600-github-repos-to-push-smartloader-malware"},"modified":"2026-07-22T09:52:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T14:52:28","slug":"fakegit-campaign-uses-7600-github-repos-to-push-smartloader-malware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/fakegit-campaign-uses-7600-github-repos-to-push-smartloader-malware","title":{"rendered":"FakeGit campaign uses 7,600 GitHub repos to push SmartLoader malware"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/fakegit-campaign-uses-7600-github-repos-to-push-smartloader-malware.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A large-scale operation dubbed \u2018FakeGit\u2019 is pushing SmartLoader and StealC malware through 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories that accumulated more than 14 million downloads.<\/p>\n<p>Over 800 repositories pretended to be AI skills or MCP servers and appeared more than 600 times in public AI registries and catalogs. This increased the likelihood of being discovered by AI agents and developers, a technique that researchers call \u201cagentbaiting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The campaign is considered a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/en_us\/research\/25\/c\/ai-assisted-fake-github-repositories.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">continuation of an older operation<\/a> that used Lumma Stealer and was attributed to a threat actor tracked as \u201cWater Kurita\u201d by researchers at cybersecurity company Trend Micro.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A large-scale operation dubbed \u2018FakeGit\u2019 is pushing SmartLoader and StealC malware through 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories that accumulated more than 14 million downloads. Over 800 repositories pretended to be AI skills or MCP servers and appeared more than 600 times in public AI registries and catalogs. This increased the likelihood of being discovered by AI [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}