[Xirdus]

I'd say checking out a malicious branch is in the same category as downloading a malicious attachment. By which I mean, it's kinda on you.

[beart]

Okay... but when "you" is a junior engineer on your team and now you are suddenly spending your entire weekend dealing with malware, it's kinda on you as well.

[krater23]

Downloading this attachement doesn't executes it. Checking out a branch in this case executes the file in the branch. Thats a big difference.

[dev_daftly]

In this case, if you just run a git command yourself it executes the file as well.

[brookst]

On windows I guess?

On Linux and MacOS you'd need to run ./git to execute a malicious binary in the cloned repo.