TH16503
Detected presence of package manifests that execute unusual system commands.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | SAFE level | SAFE assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | fail | high | high | 1 | tampering: fail Reason: dangerous package manifests |
About the issue
Many popular programming languages use standardized software packaging formats to distribute reusable code components. 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. Actions defined within the package manifest are executed automatically by the package manager during events such as package installation, compilation, testing, or on package removal. These events are used by software developers to set up the environment for package use, or to perform cleanup upon package removal. However, package manifest actions are commonly abused by threat actors to execute arbitrary commands on the development machine. It was detected that the package manifest could execute unusual operating system commands. Unusual commands resemble common threat actor tactics, such as destructive file deletion, elevation of privileges, or tampering with security settings. Unusual package manifests often contain code obfuscation, anti-analysis features, and other detection evasion techniques.
How to resolve the issue
- Investigate reported detections.
- If the software intent does not relate to the reported behavior, investigate your build and release environment for software supply chain compromise.
- You should delay the software release until the investigation is completed, or until the issue is risk accepted.
- Consider rewriting the package manifest 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
- RubyGems: 183K
- Nuget: 644K
- PyPi: 628K
- NPM: 3.72M