Security News > 2020 > May > NetBeans Projects on GitHub Targeted in Apparent Supply Chain Attack

GitHub revealed on Thursday that tens of open source NetBeans projects hosted on its platform were targeted by a piece of malware as part of what appears to be a supply chain attack.

GitHub learned about the malware, which has been named Octopus Scanner, on March 9 from a security researcher who noticed that several repositories hosted on GitHub had been serving malware, likely without their owners' knowledge.

Open source projects such as the ones targeted by Octopus Scanner can get cloned, forked and used by many others, enabling the malware to spread even more, the company warned.

The fact that the malware specifically targets NetBeans projects is interesting considering that there are other, more popular Java IDEs.

"If malware developers took the time to implement this malware specifically for NetBeans, it means that it could either be a targeted attack, or they may already have implemented the malware for build systems such as Make, MsBuild, Gradle and others as well and it may be spreading unnoticed," GitHub noted.

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