On July 13, 2024, the Phylum platform alerted us to a series of odd packages published to the npm package registry. At first glance, these packages appear entirely legitimate; however, as our system automatically noted, they contained sophisticated command and control functionality hidden in image files that would be executed

Another fun exploit! This time with local privilege escalation through Apple’s PackageKit.framework when running ZSH-based PKGs 🎉.

Lass Security's recent research on AI Package Hallucinations extends the attack technique to GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, Gemini Pro (Bard), and Coral (Cohere).

Redline Dropped Through MSIX Package, Author&colon

Despite open source software’s essential role in all software built today, it’s far too easy for bad actors to circulate malicious packages that attack the systems and users running that software. Unlike mobile app stores that can scan for and reject malicious contributions, package repositories have limited resources to review the thousands of daily updates and must maintain an open model where anyone can freely contribute. As a result, malicious packages like ua-parser-js, and node-ipc are regularly uploaded to popular repositories despite their best efforts, with sometimes devastating consequences for users.

Today we’re pleased to announce the initial prototype version of the Package Analysis project, an OpenSSF project addressing the challenge of identifying malicious packages in popular open source repositories. In just one month of analysis, the project identified more than 200 malicious packages uploaded to PyPI and npm.

When code with millions of downloads nukes user files, bad things can happen.