T1677

Poisoned Pipeline Execution

SaaSnothing on this site yetT1677 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may manipulate continuous integration / continuous development (CI/CD) processes by injecting malicious code into the build process. There are several mechanisms for poisoning pipelines: * In a <b>Direct Pipeline Execution</b> scenario, the threat actor directly modifies the CI configuration file (e.g., `gitlab-ci.yml` in GitLab).
MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

If this is happening now

Checklists and playbooks to open while the alert is still live.

Playbook for this stage

Suspicious execution on an endpoint

An EDR alert, an unexplained process, or a user reporting something odd.

how MITRE says to see it

Detection Strategy for Poisoned Pipeline Execution via SaaS CI/CD Workflows

Detects anomalous CI/CD workflow execution originating from forked repositories, with pull request (PR) metadata or commit messages containing suspicious patterns (e.g., encoded payloads), coupled with the use of insecure pipeline triggers like `pull_request_target` or excessive API usage of CI/CD secrets.

what reduces it

M1018 User Account Management. Ensure that CI/CD pipelines only have permissions they require to complete their operations. Additionally, limit the number of users who have write access to internal repositories to only those necessary.
M1054 Software Configuration. Where possible, avoid allowing pipelines to run unreviewed code. Where this is necessary, ensure that these pipelines are executed on isolated nodes without access to secrets. In GitHub, avoid using the `pull_request_target` trigger if possible, do not treat user-controlled inputs (such as branch names) as trusted, and do not use self-hosted runners on public repositories.

The description, detection analytics and mitigations are reproduced from MITRE ATT&CK, version 19.2, under its terms of use. The checklists, hunts, labs and everything else linked here are this site’s.