Five malicious Rust crates were discovered by cybersecurity researchers masquerading as time tools to steal data from developers' .env files. The Rust crates were published on crates.io between late February and early March 2026 , pretending to be the legitimate timeapi.io to trick developers.
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According to security researcher Kirill Boychenko , “ Although crates are presented as local time tools, their core behavior is to steal credentials and secrets .” The malicious packages attempt to collect sensitive data from development environments, particularly .env files , and export it to infrastructure controlled by the attackers.
The attack exploits a criticalvulnerability in developer workflows – the storage of sensitive credentials in environment configuration files. .env typically contain API keys, tokens, and other secrets that allow an attacker to compromise downstream users and gain deeper access to their environments, including cloud services, databases, and GitHub tokens.
While four of the aforementioned packages feature fairly simple .env, chrono_anchor goes a step further by implementing obfuscation and functional changes to avoid detection. Crates was advertised as a way to calibrate local time without relying on the Network Time Protocol (NTP).
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chrono_anchor embeds the extraction logic within a file named guard.rs that is called by an “optional sync” helper function to avoid programmer suspicion. Unlike other malware, the code observed in this case does not aim to create persistence on the host via a service or scheduled task.
Instead, crate attempts to repeatedly extract .env every time a developer in a Continuous Integration (CI) workflow calls the malicious code. This approach is specifically targeted at CI/CD pipelines, where automated builds and deployments can execute malicious code without direct supervision.
The disclosure follows the discovery of an automated attack campaign that targeted CI/CD pipelines in large open-source repositories, with an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bot called hackerbot-claw scanning public repositories for exploitable GitHub Actions workflows to harvest secret developers.
Between February 21 and February 28, 2026, the GitHub, which described itself as an autonomous security research agent, targeted at least seven repositories belonging to Microsoft, Datadog , and Aqua Security, among others.
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The attack involved scanning public repositories for misconfigured CI/CD pipelines, forking target repositories to prepare a malicious payload, opening a pull request with a trivial change while hiding the main payload, activating the CI pipeline by exploiting automatic activation in pull requests, and stealing secrets and access tokens.
