Summary: Security researchers have uncovered a new obfuscation technique called “Ghost Comments.” Attackers are using invisible Unicode control characters inside standard code comments to hide executable logic that is interpreted by compilers but remains invisible to human code reviewers and standard diff tools.
Business Impact: High Supply Chain Stealth. This defeats the primary control of “Manual Code Review.” A developer could approve a pull request that looks perfectly safe, unaware that the “comments” contain instructions that will be executed during the build process.
Why It Happened: Compilers and interpreters (like Python and GCC) have different handling rules for Unicode bidirectional text than code editors, creating a “visual discrepancy” gap.
Recommended Executive Action: Update your CI/CD pipelines to include a “Unicode Sanitizer” step. Configure your linters (ESLint, Pylint) to flag and reject any non-standard ASCII characters in source code files immediately.
Hashtags: #AppSec #GitHub #SupplyChain #Obfuscation #DevSecOps #GhostComments