GitHub besieged by millions of malicious repositories in ongoing attack

arstechnica.com GitHub besieged by millions of malicious repositories in ongoing attack

GitHub keeps removing malware-laced repositories, but thousands remain.

GitHub besieged by millions of malicious repositories in ongoing attack::GitHub keeps removing malware-laced repositories, but thousands remain.

6 comments

I don't understand why people are so hell bent on breaking everything like this.
- In this case? Money. They’re trying to steal crypto as far as I’ve heard
  
  And that's why no one should do crypto stuff on the same OS where they code.
This is the best summary I could come up with:

An unknown party has automated a process that forks legitimate repositories, meaning the source code is copied so developers can use it in an independent project that builds on the original one.

“Most of the forked repos are quickly removed by GitHub, which identifies the automation,” Matan Giladi and Gil David, researchers at security firm Apiiro, wrote Wednesday.

We employ manual reviews and at-scale detections that use machine learning and constantly evolve and adapt to adversarial tactics.

Supply-chain attacks that target users of developer platforms have existed since at least 2016, when a college student uploaded custom scripts to RubyGems, PyPi, and NPM.

This form of supply-chain attack is often referred to as typosquatting, because it relies on users making small errors when choosing the name of a package they want to use.

In 2021, a researcher used a similar technique to successfully execute counterfeit code on networks belonging to Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and dozens of other companies.

The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It's not really fixable, right? They're technically doing what the platform was made to do.

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