How Kusari Protects Against Recent Supply Chain Attacks
Recent attacks against projects like Trivy, LiteLLM, and Axios show the need for automated supply chain checks.
Ben Cotton
April 2, 2026
Last week, we announced that open source maintainers in CNCF and OpenSSF could use our AI code review and dependency management tool, Kusari Inspector, for free. We understand the burden of being a developer, and especially in open source. Developers don’t need homework assignments; they need reliable, practical feedback on their project’s security.
Case in point: the recent compromise of the widely-used Trivy security scanner by an attacker calling itself TeamPCP. TeamPCP inserted malware into Trivy’s GitHub Actions and published a malicious binary release. Because Trivy is used by so many projects, the damage spread quickly. Any project that used a compromised version of Trivy had credentials stolen, allowing the attackers to compromise organizations like LiteLLM and Checkmarx.
Secure software development is hard. Modern applications have dozens of dependencies, open source maintainers are overworked, and CI/CD pipelines have to balance contributor friendliness against hardened posture. Meanwhile, attackers are targeting every part of the software development lifecycle. Kusari Inspector and our Kusari Platform address multiple points in that attack chain.
How Kusari helps
Flagging Insecure GitHub Workflow Configurations
For the downstream victims of Trivy’s compromise, the root cause was generally a CI pipeline pulling in Trivy without a pinned version. For GitHub Actions, this means pinning to a specific hash, as version tags are mutable. In fact, TeamPCP updated almost every version tag for trivy-action to point to a malicious version. Kusari Inspector specifically scans for insecure GitHub workflows as part of its pull request analysis — this is one of its explicit detection categories. A PR introducing or maintaining an unpinned uses: trivy-action@v1-style reference is flagged before it gets merged, prompting the team to switch to a commit-hash pin.
Transitive Dependency Analysis
Many companies that were affected in a supply chain attack don't even know they depend on the compromised package — it is a transitive dependency, often several layers deep. Kusari Inspector analyzes the full dependency graph, including transitive dependencies, to give developers the full picture. Developers can see right away when one of their transitive dependencies has a vulnerability, which allows them to prevent introducing that vulnerability.
SBOM Generation for Rapid Incident Response
Kusari Inspector optionally generates a software bill of materials (SBOM). This records the specific versions of dependencies that went into a particular build. With a continuously-updated SBOM, security teams can immediately query which services are affected, rather than racing to reconstruct their dependency inventory under pressure.
Real-Time Blast Radius Assessment
When a compromised package does get through, Kusari Platform has broader capabilities to accelerate the response and remediation. Using Inspector-generated or user-provided SBOMs, Kusari provides a real-time blast radius graph that shows every app and service affected. Rather than manually auditing dozens of repositories (some companies reported having to audit over 50 active repositories, examining download logs to determine the exact version installed in each workflow run), Kusari Inspector users have that cross-repository view already built and queryable.
Prioritized Risk Scoring to Cut Through Alert Noise
Kusari identifies and ranks risky, low-trust, or vulnerable dependencies — both direct and transitive — based on industry-trusted data sources including CVSS, EPSS, and Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, reducing noise by accounting for unexploitable vulnerabilities. By focusing on the most impactful vulnerabilities first, developers can more efficiently reduce the overall risk.
The Bigger Picture
The big picture issue is that the software supply chain is too often built on implicit trust and not enough immutability or verification. Organizations routinely allow third-party actions, packages, and release artifacts into build pipelines because they come from trusted vendors or popular projects. Verification, when it happens, is treated as a one-time activity. Kusari Inspector is specifically designed to address infrequent verification and implicit trust at the most effective point: the pull request, before code ships.
Every safety rule in the physical world came from lessons learned the hard way. Software is no different. With every new software supply chain attack, we come up with new ways to improve security practices and tooling. Now is a great time to get started with Kusari Inspector. We’re confident in its ability to help developers avoid incidents.
Related content:
- What's in the SOSS? - Podcast #57 - From Noise to Signal: Security Expertise and Kusari Inspector with Mike Lieberman
- Kusari + CNCF partnership blog
- Kusari + OpenSSF partnership blog
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