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Service abuse: GitHub notification with excessive mentions and suspicious links

Sublime Rules

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Summary
This rule detects potential abuse of GitHub's notification system by identifying inbound messages that impersonate legitimate GitHub alerts but contain highly suspicious characteristics. It targets messages that originate from the official GitHub notification sender (notifications@github.com) and pass several authenticity checks (reply_to must be reply.github.com, noreply@github.com in Return-Path, and the Message-ID may reference an unsubscribe URL). It then filters out benign internal alerts by excluding common GitHub CC recipients and any sender whose display name matches org display names. The rule requires exactly one external link (excluding GitHub-owned domains and certain image links, and excluding AWS Codesuite links) and flags that external link as suspicious if it points to a domain in one of several risky categories: free file hosts, free subdomain hosts (with subdomain present), URL shorteners, or a domain that is very new (less than 20 days old, based on WHOIS data). Finally, the rule flags messages where the thread contains more than 20 mentions (i.e., the display_text in current_thread.links starts with “@” for more than 20 items), indicating mass mentions as a social-engineering vector. The combined criteria aim to identify phishing or malware delivery scenarios delivered via GitHub notifications that leverage mass mentions and dubious external links, while excluding legitimate internal communications and typical GitHub notification patterns from trusted domains.
Categories
  • Network
  • Web
Data Sources
  • Network Traffic
Created: 2026-04-08