louislang

You're not wrong. We (Phylum) have seen and called out a security company for typosquatting a popular package as a means of advertising. It felt gross to impact random devs for marketing...

We've seen a handful of individuals just go to PyPi or NPM and search for _something_ loosely related to what they need, and just blindly install it. I got a report yesterday of someone that did this with a Python package; similar setup: loosely related name, no README... guy still ran it.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of Phylum.

I can absolutely assure you, we have no affiliation with these packages. We end up reporting much more malicious packages than these every single day. We wouldn't risk harming our reputation to publish three dumb packages. Just thought these were interesting in a diabolical sort of way.

Having been through the pain of SOC2 Type 2, I'll consider this a big announcement as well!

I think it would go down, but by how much? And is it significant enough to remove the requirement to vent outside?

What impact does an enclosure with a filter have on the emission of particles and VOCs?

If I had to guess, quite a few. I've reported my fair share of security issues and a number of them started out by accident.

I'm always amazed how often that happens. Again, excellent finding.

Great find! Were you actively looking, or did you just stumble on something that set off your spidey-sense?

We report them when we find them (to Github, PyPI, NPM, etc). Unfortunately the process on the other side isn't super quick. For example, we reported some malware to NPM on Dec 31, 2022 and received an email from them stating they were starting their investigation on Jan 9, 2023. The people responsible for removal are simply inundated with malware reports.

For GitHub, they just seem to be a bit more careful in what they remove. Malware (and other security related code) _can_ be used for educational purposes. As such, they aren't as quick to nuke this stuff from the site.

See their acceptable use policy:

> Note that GitHub allows dual-use content and supports the posting of content that is used for research into vulnerabilities, malware, or exploits, as the publication and distribution of such content has educational value and provides a net benefit to the security community. We assume positive intention and use of these projects to promote and drive improvements across the ecosystem.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici...

Even when they do act, it can be slow, unfortunately.

Been working on this exact thing for nearly two years at https://www.phylum.io. We identified and reported about 1.2k packages in ecosystems like npm, pypi and others last year. GitHub app that checks your PRs for malware. We also built a free open source sandbox for package installations [1] so if malware does get executed it’s done in a locked down environment. Happy to chat further about this sort of thing, it’s something I’m wildly interested in!

[1] https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

We’ve (https://www.phylum.io) been tracking this actor as well. There are more packages than this blog post notes, including: fredli, derkpy, and fredmi. The first packages from this actor appeared on Jan 1.

A bit of work has been done to RE the binary itself, and we’ve found references to the following GitHub https://github.com/T4hg/frek/blob/master/__init__.py

Happy to chat with anyone that’s interested in this sort of thing. We’ve got a trove of samples that seems to grow daily!

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at Phylum)

Our system has been alerting us to this actor's activities all morning (beginning sometime last night). They have been wildly active, and have continued to publish packages as we've worked to get them removed.

Interestingly, they have ported the Python bits to Javascript and have started publishing to NPM as well. Exact same TTP, crossing two ecosystems.

Our platform monitors these ecosystems, scanning packages for signs of risk as they are published. This way we can get them removed before they impact the wider open source community. We currently support Javascript, Typescript, Python, Ruby, Java, C# and recently just rolled out Golang and Rust support into beta.

We believe in a defense in depth approach to supply chain security and have also published an open source sandbox that limits access to the filesystem, network, disk and environment variables.

https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

This is rolled into our CLI so that you can do things like `phylum npm install <pkgName>` and install packages in a sandboxed way.

Happy to answer questions about this attack, security, sandboxes, etc!

I’m the guy that opened that issue. To be clear, I’m NOT affiliated with datadog. I am co-founder of a software supply chain company https://phylum.io.

We scan all the open source packages as they’re published, and got a hit for this pretty much right away. The volume of packages that get published that are malware is astonishing…

Kind of unfortunate that these guys just closed the issue, if they aren’t malicious actors. I suspect that this is a fake account, and not an account compromise, though.

That's fair, thanks for the feedback!

That’s a different, unrelated campaign!

Absolutely don't disagree with this sentiment. The fact of the matter is the attackers only have to be "right" once. Whereas the rest of us have to be right hundreds or thousands of times. If it's a numbers game, the odds are definitely in favor of the attackers.

Cryptocurrency aside, it definitely looks like these attacks are ramping up and we - the developers with access to critical infrastructure - are the primary targets. Today its crypto, tomorrow it's SSH keys.

It's both worrisome and tremendously annoying.

no problem, happy to chat whenever!

This is wonderfully absurd in the best sort of way

Oh I meant malware generating addresses that look directionally similar to the address the user expects (as opposed to a random address that's hardcoded). I'm not sure if this is a thing, or just conjecture from others.

Working on it! https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

Allows you to specify the allowed permissions in a toml file. Still a wip, but would love some feedback!

> Securing the ecosystem is going to be serious work

Oh it _absolutely_ is!

We're working extremely hard here and I think we're making great strides. More hard work to come, but I think it's absolutely worth the effort!

We haven't seen this particular sort of thing just yet in packages. There was a similar attack from a few years ago called "pastejacking" that did something directionally similar to what you're suggesting though!

This would be an incredibly useful feature, I think. It was part of the motivation for our sandbox, honestly. It should mostly operate as a pass through the the various package managers - but with some extra security checks.

In this way a `phylum npm install <pkgName>` would perform the typosquat checks _and_ limit access to system resources. You can even alias this as `alias npm="phylum npm"` so that it's easier for the user.

We are basically ingesting and analyzing every package as it gets published to the various ecosystems (currently NPM, PyPI, Rubygems, Maven and Nuget; Go and Crates support landing in beta soon).

This is currently offered as a SaaS solution, but we'll be providing an on-prem offering by EOY that should work well in an air-gapped environment.

The sandbox I mentioned above is rolled into our CLI by default, but that should operate well enough on its own without needing to call out to our API if you wanted!

There was some discussion of this over on Reddit. I didn't see evidence of it, but the claim was that this had already happened. I'd be curious if someone had some examples of it in the wild.

We're trying to stay on top of this as much as possible. I'm hoping if we can be quick to report, the attackers will have wasted a bunch of effort on this campaign and not see a dime.

Awesome seeing this posted! Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Phylum.

This campaign is ongoing. Our system just notified us of two more packages, which have been reported to PyPI. I expect this list to continue to grow throughout the day.

As a related aside, we are working on a package sandbox that prevents access to disk, network and env variables during package installation. It's not quite ready for primetime, but it is completely open source and we'd love some early feedback/contributions!

https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

If anyone has any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them!

Containers aren't great security boundaries. To get the safety you'd really need, you should absolutely use a VM.

Oh absolutely. Unless everyone wants to be cool and stop publishing malware, gotta take a defense in depth approach here.