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SQ30120

Detected presence of software components with political protest messages.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
failmediumhigh2malware: fail
Reason: protestware components found

About the issue​

Authors of open source software may decide to use their projects to spread political messages. Running software packages that include protestware code may trigger protest-related functions when executed in the targeted environments or geographies. Protest-motivated code is commonly implemented as a simple display of harmless messages that call for peace. However, over time protestware may evolve to include code that performs excessive logging, issues denial of service, or even deletes user files. Software packages that contain protestware code are considered to be potentially unwanted applications. When political activism escalates to inclusion of destructive code, additional malware detection policies trigger to flag malicious intent.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Inspect behaviors exhibited by the detected software components.
  • If the software behaviors differ from expected, investigate the build and release environment for software supply chain compromise.
  • Revise the use of components that raise these alarms. If you can't deprecate those components, make sure they are well-documented.
  • Avoid using this software package until it is vetted as safe.

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).