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SQ30102

Detected presence of software components commonly abused for malicious application loading.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
passmediummediumNonemalware: warning
Reason: riskware components found

About the issue​

Some software components may allow arbitrary code execution. Due to their design, applications may not check the type of content they are tasked to load or execute. Failing to enforce such checks may even lead to elevated privilege execution of unverified code. In those cases, malicious code can achieve stealth by being invoked through digitally signed and highly trusted applications. Those software components are known as Living off the Land binaries (LOLBins) among security professionals. Some Windows operating system versions may even be configured to prevent loading of commonly abused kernel drivers by default. When Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity (HVCI) feature is enabled, the operating system will refuse to load any of the drivers found on its blocklist.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Whenever possible, release software packages without components commonly abused by attackers.
  • If the software component update can't resolve the issue, create a plan to isolate or replace the component with an alternative.

Incidence statistics​

ReversingLabs periodically collects and analyzes the contents of popular software package repositories for threat research purposes. Analysis results are used to calculate incidence statistics for issues (policy violations) that Spectra Assure can detect in software packages.

This section is updated when new data becomes available.

Total amount of packages analyzed

  • RubyGems: 183K
  • Nuget: 644K
  • PyPi: 628K
  • NPM: 3.72M

Total detections per repository

For every repository, the chart shows the number of packages that triggered the software assurance policy. In other words, it shows how many packages in each package repository were found to have the specific issue described on this page. This information helps you understand how common the issue is across different software communities.

If a repository is absent from the chart, that means none of the packages in that repository triggered this policy during analysis, or the policy was not used during analysis.

Distribution of total detections by project popularity

For every repository, the chart shows how many of the total detections belong to the Top 100 (1-100), Top 1000 (101-1000) and Top 10 000 (1001-10 000) most downloaded projects. This information helps you understand the impact of the issue within each community, making it clearer when the issue affects the most popular projects.

If the chart shows zero values for all of the top project groups, that means all detections were in unranked projects (lower than 10 000 on the list of most downloaded projects).