Ravie LakshmananJul 27, 2026Software Supply Chain / DevSecOps

GitHub has announced a new cooldown mechanism in Dependabot, allowing the tool to wait at least three days after a release is published before opening a pull request.

"The cooldown configuration option in the dependabot.yml still controls the behavior, though, so you can choose a different cooldown parameter that fits your project," the Microsoft-owned subsidiary said.

According to GitHub, the three-day cooldown default only applies to version updates, which are designed to keep software dependencies up-to-date. Security updates will continue to be pushed right away, permitting Dependabot to issue an alert and open a pull request to move the project to the patched version.

With this update, the idea is to handle scenarios where a threat actor manages to push a poisoned version of a popular package, which then gets quickly pulled by downstream projects before that version is yanked from the registry. Although such trojanized packages are short-lived, the time period for which they remain accessible is enough to expand the blast radius of a supply chain attack.