Security News > 2021 > February > Researcher hacks over 35 tech firms in novel supply chain attack
A researcher managed to breach over 35 major companies' internal systems, including Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Shopify, Netflix, Yelp, Tesla, and Uber, in a novel software supply chain attack.
Unlike traditional typosquatting attacks that rely on social engineering tactics or the victim misspelling a package name, this particular supply chain attack is more sophisticated as it needed no action by the victim, who automatically received the malicious packages.
In some cases, as with PyPI packages, the researcher noticed that the package with the higher version would be prioritized regardless of wherever it was located.
Using this technique, Birsan executed a successful supply chain attack against Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Shopify, Netflix, Tesla, Yelp, and Uber simply by publishing public packages using the same name as the company's internal ones.
Recon and data exfiltration over DNS. The packages had preinstall scripts that automatically launched a script to exfiltrate identifying information from the machine as soon as the build process pulled the packages in.
"Specifically, I believe that finding new and clever ways to leak internal package names will expose even more vulnerable systems, and looking into alternate programming languages and repositories to target will reveal some additional attack surface for dependency confusion bugs," the researcher concluded in his blog post.
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