Displaying items by tag: sdlc

Hey, remember that supply chain attack on NPM that happened recently? Which one? Yeah, that is sort of the problem with recent supply chain attacks. In particular the ones that are targeting the development pipeline. This is because they are starting to happen so often that they all blur together, yet NPM and other critical components of the development supply chain are still targets for attackers to either get their malicious packages onto development systems, or in the final compiled binary that is then sent out to the general public. To call this problematic is to describe a nuclear bomb as a big firecracker. Ok, soapbox on the importance of SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) hygiene and security put away for now.

Popular open-source repository NPM is back in the news as a pair of packages were found to have malware in them. The malware in question is TurkoRat. TurkoRat is an open-source information stealer that has a few features attached to it. Among some of the components are things like a wallet grabber (wallets.js) which seems geared towards stealing crypto currency. Other components are ones you would expect from an InforStealer like credential theft etc. The package was found by ReversingLabs after it had been in place for two months.

Attackers are always looking to get targets coming and going. As such you have a very rich ecosystem of attack types to cover as much ground as possible. A concerning one has always been direct supply chain attacks. These attacks seek to compromise software during the development stage, so the malicious pieces get bundled into the released code and signed with a trusted certificate. The highly publicized attack on SolarWinds is one of those types of attacks and shows just how effective and dangerous they can be. Supply chain attacks some in multiple flavors including (but certainly not limited to) compromising code repositories, poisoned plugins or open-source packages, and targeting of developer systems.