Security News
Multiple malicious Python packages available on the PyPI repository were caught stealing sensitive information like AWS credentials and transmitting it to publicly exposed endpoints accessible by anyone. PyPI is a repository of open-source packages that software developers use to pick the building blocks of their Python-based projects or share their work with the community.
The conviction follows the infamous 2019 hack of Capital One in which personal information of more than 100 million US and Canadian credit card applicants were swiped from the financial giant's misconfigured cloud-based storage. The data was submitted by credit card hopefuls between 2005 and early 2019, and Thompson was able to get into Capital One's AWS storage thanks to a "Misconfigured web application firewall."
For a second time in less than a year, the Travis CI platform for software development and testing has exposed user data containing authentication tokens that could give access to developers' accounts on GitHub, Amazon Web Services, and Docker Hub. Researchers at Aqua Security discovered that "Tens of thousands of user tokens" are exposed through the Travis CI API that offer access to more than 770 million logs with various types of credentials belonging to free tier users.
Two trojanized Python and PHP packages have been uncovered in what's yet another instance of a software supply chain attack targeting the open source ecosystem. One of the packages in question is "Ctx," a Python module available in the PyPi repository.
A keen-eyed researcher at SANS recently wrote about a new and rather specific sort of supply chain attack against open-source software modules in Python and PHP. Following on-line discussions about a suspicious public Python module, Yee Ching Tok noted that a package called ctx in the popular PyPi repository had suddenly received an "Update", despite not otherwise being touched since late 2014. In theory, of course, there's nothing wrong with old packages suddenly coming back to life.
The hacker behind this hijack has now broken silence and explained his reasons to BleepingComputer. The hijacker of these libraries is an Istanbul-based security researcher, Yunus Aydın aka SockPuppets, who has attested to the fact when approached by BleepingComputer.
The threat actor even replaced the older, safe versions of 'ctx' with code that exfiltrates the developer's environment variables, to collect secrets like Amazon AWS keys and credentials. Versions of a 'phpass' fork published to the PHP/Composer package repository Packagist had been altered to steal secrets in a similar fashion.
PyPI module 'ctx' that gets downloaded over 20,000 times a week has been compromised in a software supply chain attack with malicious versions stealing the developer's environment variables. The threat actor even replaced the older, safe versions of 'ctx' with code that exfiltrates the developer's environment variables, to collect secrets like Amazon AWS keys and credentials.
LemonDuck, a cross-platform cryptocurrency mining botnet, is targeting Docker to mine cryptocurrency on Linux systems as part of an active malware campaign. With compromised cloud instances becoming a hotbed for illicit cryptocurrency mining activities, the findings underscore the need to secure containers from potential risks throughout the software supply chain.
Amazon Web Services has updated its Log4j security patches after it was discovered the original fixes made customer deployments vulnerable to container escape and privilege escalation. The vulnerabilities introduced by Amazon's Log4j hotpatch - CVE-2021-3100, CVE-2021-3101, CVE-2022-0070, CVE-2022-0071 - are all high-severity bugs rated 8.8 out of 10 on the CVSS. AWS customers using Java software in their off-prem environments should grab the latest patch set from Amazon and install.