Category: open source

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Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware

Posted on By infossl
malware, open source, Security technology, social engineering, Uncategorized

Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploiting a property of GitHub: comments to a particular repo can contain files, and … Read More “Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware” »

Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects

Posted on By infossl
backdoors, open source, Security technology, social engineering, Uncategorized

After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular … Read More “Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects” »

Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened

Posted on By infossl
backdoors, cybersecurity, economics of security, hacking, linux, malware, open source, Security technology, social engineering, ssh, Uncategorized

Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The security of the global internet depends on countless obscure pieces … Read More “Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened” »

xz Utils Backdoor

Posted on By infossl
backdoors, cybersecurity, hacking, malware, open source, Security technology, social engineering, Uncategorized

The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica: Malicious code added to xz Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 modified the … Read More “xz Utils Backdoor” »

Friday Squid Blogging: Sqids

Posted on By infossl
open source, Security technology, squid, Uncategorized

They’re short unique strings: Sqids (pronounced “squids”) is an open-source library that lets you generate YouTube-looking IDs from numbers. These IDs are short, can be generated from a custom alphabet and are guaranteed to be collision-free. I haven’t dug into the details enough to know how they can be guaranteed to be collision-free. As usual, … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Sqids” »

Open-Source LLMs

Posted on By infossl
artificial intelligence, essays, Meta, open source, Security technology, Uncategorized

In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didn’t just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers immediately started modifying it, improving it, and getting it … Read More “Open-Source LLMs” »

Securing Open-Source Software

Posted on By infossl
cybersecurity, infrastructure, open source, Security technology, Uncategorized

Good essay arguing that open-source software is a critical national-security asset and needs to be treated as such: Open source is at least as important to the economy, public services, and national security as proprietary code, but it lacks the same standards and safeguards. It bears the qualities of a public good and is as … Read More “Securing Open-Source Software” »

Developer Sabotages Open-Source Software Package

Posted on By infossl
malware, open source, russia, Security technology, Uncategorized

This is a big deal: A developer has been caught adding malicious code to a popular open-source package that wiped files on computers located in Russia and Belarus as part of a protest that has enraged many users and raised concerns about the safety of free and open source software. The application, node-ipc, adds remote … Read More “Developer Sabotages Open-Source Software Package” »

Finding Vulnerabilities in Open Source Projects

Posted on By infossl
google, microsoft, open source, Security technology, Uncategorized, vulnerabilities

The Open Source Security Foundation announced $10 million in funding from a pool of tech and financial companies, including $5 million from Microsoft and Google, to find vulnerabilities in open source projects: The “Alpha” side will emphasize vulnerability testing by hand in the most popular open-source projects, developing close working relationships with a handful of … Read More “Finding Vulnerabilities in Open Source Projects” »

Backdoor Added — But Found — in PHP

Posted on By infossl
authentication, backdoors, hacking, open source, Security technology, supply chain, Uncategorized

Unknown hackers attempted to add a backdoor to the PHP source code. It was two malicious commits, with the subject “fix typo” and the names of known PHP developers and maintainers. They were discovered and removed before being pushed out to any users. But since 79% of the Internet’s websites use PHP, it’s scary. Developers … Read More “Backdoor Added — But Found — in PHP” »