CVE-2026-33634Aquasecurity Trivy Embedded Malicious Code Vulnerability

What it is

The product itself contains code that acts against its users.

How it is reached

An attacker can exploit it over the network, with an ordinary user account, and nobody has to click anything.

What an attacker gains

A successful attack can read the data it protects, change data or behaviour and take it offline. In practice, this kind of flaw lets an attacker run their code inside your build or your running service. The damage can spread past the vulnerable component into others.

Is it being exploited?

CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2026-03-26: it is being exploited in the wild. EPSS estimates a 60% chance of exploitation activity in the next 30 days, higher than 99% of scored CVEs.

What to do

1. Treat it as urgent: it is on CISA's KEV list. CISA's deadline for US federal agencies: 2026-04-09.
2. Apply the update for your edition of Aquasecurity Trivy. Fixed builds: setup-trivy: 0.2.6; trivy-action: 0.35.0.
3. Until it is patched, review who holds accounts that can reach it.
4. Check exposed instances for signs of compromise, not only for the version.

Description from NVD

Trivy is a security scanner. On March 19, 2026, a threat actor used compromised credentials to publish a malicious Trivy v0.69.4 release, force-push 76 of 77 version tags in `aquasecurity/trivy-action` to credential-stealing malware, and replace all 7 tags in `aquasecurity/setup-trivy` with malicious commits. This incident is a continuation of the supply chain attack that began in late February 2026. Following the initial disclosure on March 1, credential rotation was performed but was not atomic (not all credentials were revoked simultaneously). The attacker could have use a valid token to exfiltrate newly rotated secrets during the rotation window (which lasted a few days). This could have allowed the attacker to retain access and execute the March 19 attack. Affected components include the `aquasecurity/trivy` Go / Container image version 0.69.4, the `aquasecurity/trivy-action` GitHub Action versions 0.0.1 – 0.34.2 (76/77), and the`aquasecurity/setup-trivy` GitHub Action versions 0.2.0 – 0.2.6, prior to the recreation of 0.2.6 with a safe commit. Known safe versions include versions 0.69.2 and 0.69.3 of the Trivy binary, version 0.35.0 of trivy-action, and version 0.2.6 of setup-trivy. Additionally, take other mitigations to ensure the safety of secrets. If there is any possibility that a compromised version ran in one's environment, all secrets accessible to affected pipelines must be treated as exposed and rotated immediately. Check whether one's organization pulled or executed Trivy v0.69.4 from any source. Remove any affected artifacts immediately. Review all workflows using `aquasecurity/trivy-action` or `aquasecurity/setup-trivy`. Those who referenced a version tag rather than a full commit SHA should check workflow run logs from March 19–20, 2026 for signs of compromise. Look for repositories named `tpcp-docs` in one's GitHub organization. The presence of such a repository may indicate that the fallback exfiltration mechanism was triggered and secrets were successfully stolen. Pin GitHub Actions to full, immutable commit SHA hashes, don't use mutable version tags.