Security News > 2023 > March > Malicious Python Package Uses Unicode Trickery to Evade Detection and Steal Data

A malicious Python package on the Python Package Index repository has been found to use Unicode as a trick to evade detection and deploy an info-stealing malware.

The package in question, named onyxproxy, was uploaded to PyPI on March 15, 2023, and comes with capabilities to harvest and exfiltrate credentials and other valuable data.

According to software supply chain security firm Phylum, the package incorporates its malicious behavior in a setup script that's packed with thousands of seemingly legitimate code strings.

These strings include a mix of bold and italic fonts and are still readable and can be parsed by the Python interpreter, only to activate the execution of the stealer malware upon installation of the package.

The development highlights continued attempts on part of threat actors to find new ways to slip through string-matching based defenses, leveraging "How the Python interpreter handles Unicode to obfuscate their malware."

On a related note, Canadian cybersecurity company PyUp detailed the discovery of three new fraudulent Python packages - aiotoolbox, asyncio-proxy, and pycolorz - that were downloaded cumulatively over 1,000 times and designed to retrieve obfuscated code from a remote server.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2023/03/malicious-python-package-uses-unicode.html