Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages

Tutorials using them are so widespread… Start feeling like a weirdo for not wanting to give an unknown rando full indefinite root access to the system, with virtually zero peer review… all to install one version of a package where updates are undesired or infrequent…

No. It wouldn't have. That's the whole point of the miasma worm, because it changes too fast in its signatures and helper methods. The encrypted malware implant uses a changing AES-128-GCM key that's used to decrypt the payload, and that key is per-where-it-is-uploaded on GitHub. The code itself is dynamically renamed in its methods, re-used shuffled offsets for encrypted symbols, among other things. It's a mutating malware and the worst enemy from tools that rely on signatures.

Ironically, APT28/29 is somewhat relying on Microsoft being too slow to auto block users and repositories on GitHub that are the C2 infrastructure. Think about that for a second what this implies for your cyber strategy.

By the time you're able to scan signatures or "strings" you're already playing a cat and mouse game with a fully automated botnet, which you will never win. The only other ones I've observed during the last week that seem to be able to track this malware implant's changes were socket.dev. ALL other supply chain tools didn't even know about Miasma and re-invented it as a new campaign. They didn't have the skilled enough people nor toolchain to reverse the malware payload quickly enough to be able to keep up every 24h when they push out a new adapter for another ecosystem.

By fully automated I mean they're already using the credentials they stole less than 48 hours ago from a different package ecosystem, because the email addresses and names etc keep appearing from people who likely didn't even understand the impact of this self-spreading worm.

And having an IOC that checks for, let's say, any package that depends on bun won't help either because the malware will just use external means to re-download it. See the second PyPi campaign, where they just changed the dropper to use compressed WHL files and the setup.pth files that are auto-executed to download the dropper. They changed this after the PyPi maintainers flagged the first wave of malware droppers from the RedHat campaign.

As long as the package managers in those ecosystems aren't fully rewritten from scratch to accomodate for chroots, sandboxes, network and domain logs that are _only allowlistable per entry_ this won't change, and will stay being a feasible malware deployment strategy for supply chain attacks.

Repo for Mitigation Tool (I'm human so I play catch 21 with an LLM powered botnet) [1] ... Tech details in the blog post [2]

Also this is a problem across all package managers. Composer is also affected. Rubygems is also affected. NPM is also affected. PyPi is also affected. Go is also affected.

Nobody is talking about this, and I think this should be more openly discussed how much negligence and external trust we put in package managers in general. This really needs to change.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

[2] https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/malware-insights-mia...