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TH16129

Detected presence of software components that can tamper with other installed software.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
passhighhighNoneNone

About the issue​

Software components are typically distributed in standardized packaging formats. Software packages are built from instructions written within package manifests that act as blueprints for package assembly. A package manifest declares the most important software properties, such as the package name, its authors and license, external dependencies, and various actions that may occur during the package lifecycle. Package managers are specialized tools used by developers to manage software components. Package managers read these manifests to deploy software components along with their dependencies. The premise of the package management system is that software components are isolated from each other, and that they rely on the package manager to provide their dependencies. However, it was detected that a software component includes code capable of accessing or modifying directories that are maintained exclusively by package managers. This is unusual as it resembles tactics used by threat actors that tamper with installed software components and inject malicious code into trusted execution paths.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Investigate reported detections as indicators of software tampering.
  • Consult Mitre ATT&CK documentation: T1554 - Compromise Host Software Binary.
  • Consider rewriting the flagged code without using the marked behaviors.

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

  • Linux: 562K
  • NPM: 5.12M
  • Nuget: 735K
  • PS Gallery: 17K
  • PyPi: 838K
  • RubyGems: 203K
  • VS Code: 113K
  • Windows: 3.7K

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).