During the month of September, an attacker operating under the pseudonym "kohlersbtuh15", attempted to exploit the open-source community by uploading a series of malicious packages to the PyPi package manager. Based on the names of these packages and the code contained within them, it appears that this attacker targeted developers that use Aliyun services (Alibaba Cloud), telegram, and AWS.
In early August, ReversingLabs identified a malicious supply chain campaign that the research team dubbed “VMConnect.” That campaign consisted of two dozen malicious Python packages posted to the Python Package Index (PyPI) open-source repository. The packages mimicked popular open-source Python tools, including vConnector, a wrapper module for pyVmomi VMware vSphere bindings; eth-tester, a collection of tools for testing Ethereum-based applications; and databases, a tool that gives asynchronous support for a range of databases.
After inadvertently finding that InfoSys leaked an AWS key on PyPi I wanted to know how many other live AWS keys may be present on Python package index. After scanning every release published to PyPi I found 57 valid access keys from organisations like:
Amazon themselves 😅
Intel
Stanford, Portland and Louisiana University
The Australian Government
General Atomics fusion department
Terradata
Delta Lake
And Top Glove, the worlds largest glove manufacturer 🧤
We used our internal automated system for monitoring open-source repositories and discovered two other malicious Python packages in the PyPI.