What 17,845 GitHub Repos Taught Us About Malicious MCP Servers

VirusTotal audited ~17,845 MCP server projects on GitHub and used automated code-inspection to flag 1,408 as potentially malicious or dangerously insecure; the report catalogs numerous attack vectors—remote code execution, credential harvesting, server impersonation, supply-chain abuse, context poisoning and others—and recommends mitigations such as signing/pinning, sandboxing, visible revocable permissions, and filtering model outputs.