Description

As per reports, 11 malicious Python packages with over 41,000 downloads from the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository, including importantpackage/important-package, pptest, ipboards, owlmoon, DiscordSafety, trrfab, 10Cent10/10Cent11, yandex-yt, and yiffparty, are suspected of potentially harvesting the Discord app's access tokens and credentials to execute dependency confusion attacks and have been deleted from the PyPI repository. As per the researchers, the malicious packages "importantpackage," "10Cent10," and their variants establish a reverse shell on a compromised system, allowing hackers to take control of the device and use a novel exfiltration mechanism to evade detection, where it exfiltrate sensitive data by sending HTTPS requests to the pypi.python[.]org domain, which disguises as a legitimate request to the PyPI site and is later rerouted by Fastly's content delivery network (CDN) as an HTTP request to the command-and-control server. In addition to the above packages, "ipboards" and "trrfab" packages disguise as valid dependencies and are downloaded onto users' computers via dependency confusion or namespace confusion technique. Furthermore, the "ipboards" and "pptest" packages employ DNS tunnelling, which utilizes DNS queries as a communication route between the infected machine and the remote server. In the dependency confusion attack, threat actors upload malicious packages to public repositories with higher versions and names identical to legal internal private packages, prompting the target's package management to download the malicious package. Further, Researchers said that attackers used package managers as an attack vector to install malicious malware, as well as subtle tactics such innovative exfiltration and DNS tunnelling to avoid detection.