Fedora detects a compromised contributor being impersonated by an AI agent to push questionable changes
11.06.2026 10:10 (MSK)

Adam Williamson from Red Hat, who leads the quality assurance team for the Fedora project, noticed suspicious activity from Nathan Giovannini, who joined the Fedora project in 2016 and participated in the Fedora Infrastructure Team for some time. It is not ruled out that the activities carried out over the last two months on Nathan's behalf were aimed at gaining trust by building a history of accepted changes and participating in bug fixing, before committing malicious actions, similar to the xz package backdoor incident.

Suspicion was raised by the fact that the previously inactive developer suddenly began actively participating in bug discussions and sending patches in May, and this activity showed patterns typical of AI usage. For example, AI-generated summaries appeared in the comments, after which Nathan was asked not to abuse copying outputs from an AI assistant.

In addition, there were meaningless reassignments of issue reports to himself in subsystems where Nathan is not a maintainer (1, 2, 3), changes to the status or priority of issue fixes (1, 2), postings of AI-generated recommendations to the authors of bug reports (1, 2, 3), and submissions of AI-generated patches. Bypassing the project's rules, Nathan closed bug reports immediately after submitting AI patches to upstream projects, without waiting for their acceptance, or simply closed them with the "NOTABUG" flag and a recommendation to re-verify the occurrence of the issue.

Adam Williamson assumed that Nathan was using an AI agent to fix bugs in Fedora and asked him to stop using the AI agent in autonomous mode. Nathan replied that it was not his AI agent, his credentials had been compromised, and an outsider was acting on his behalf. Subsequently, Nathan posted a message stating that he had regained access to his Fedora and GitHub accounts, and also wrote that his official GitHub account is "nathangiovannini99".

The message raised even more questions, as the mentioned account had been created an hour before the message was published, and at least two other accounts associated with Nathan (leurus27-boop, nathan9513-aps) surfaced on GitHub. It could not be ruled out that an attacker who had gained access to Nathan's email was continuing to communicate with the developers. Nathan's account access to Bugzilla was blocked, and a review of all changes made by him was initiated.

It turned out that the suspicious activity started on April 7, and some patches sent by Nathan only created the illusion of a fix. However, such patches were accepted into the Anaconda installer and included in the Anaconda 45.5 release. The Anaconda maintainer reverted the introduced changes and published the Anaconda 45.6 release without these patches.

Furthermore, fixes submitted on Nathan's behalf were accepted by the developers of the osc (openSUSE Commander) utility, which implements a command-line interface for the Open Build Service build system. Another patch was submitted for inclusion in the lxqt-policykit package, linked to fixing an issue in Fedora, but Fedora developers managed to warn the maintainer before it was accepted. The patches did not include malicious actions, but it is assumed that they could have been preparation for introducing malicious changes into the components of the build system and the service providing privileged operations in the lxqt-admin interface. Fixes submitted by Nathan were also noticed in the gwenview and easyeffects projects.

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Google Voice ATO

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VRChat username
Email address associated with the VRChat account
VRChat+ subscription status
Login history, including device information, hardware identifiers, and IP addresses

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