Clipper malware found in over 451 PyPI packages

Phylum security researchers have discovered over 451 packages on the Python Package Index (PyPI) that are infected with “clipper” malware.

Clippers replace the contents of a victim’s clipboard with something which benefits the attacker. The most prevalent clippers today look for cryptocurrency addresses and modify them to steal funds.

Starting on February 9th, Phylum was alerted by its automated risk detection platform to a long series of suspicious publications to...

15 February 2023 | Hacking & Security

Malware campaign targets official Python and JavaScript repos

An active malware campaign is targeting official Python and JavaScript repositories.

Software supply chain security firm Phylum spotted the campaign. Phylum said that it discovered the campaign after noticing a flurry of activity around typosquats of the popular Python requests package.

Typosquats take advantage of simple typos to install malicious packages.

In this case, the PyPI typos include: dequests, fequests, gequests, rdquests, reauests, reduests,...

13 December 2022 | Hacking & Security

PyPI maintainers warn of ongoing phishing attack

The maintainers of the Python Package Index (PyPI) have warned of an ongoing phishing attack targeting users.

“Today we received reports of a phishing campaign targeting PyPI users. This is the first known phishing attack against PyPI,” wrote the maintainers in a tweet.

A phishing email is sent to users warning that PyPI is implementing a mandatory ‘validation’ process and that users must follow a link or risk their package being removed:

The...

25 August 2022 | Hacking & Security

PyPI package installs cryptominer on Linux systems

A malicious PyPI package was used to install a Monero cryptominer on Linux systems.

The package in question, secretslib, was pushed to the official third-party software repo for Python on 6th August 2022. The package was described as “secrets matching and verification made easy”.

Sonatype’s automated malware detection system flagged secretslib as potentially malicious. Further analysis proved its suspicions to be correct.

“The package covertly runs...

15 August 2022 | Hacking & Security