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TH16505

Detected presence of package manifests that hijack operating system commands.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
failhighhigh1tampering: 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, list of external dependencies, and various actions that may occur during the package lifecycle. Package manifests allow developers to register their own commands with the operating system. This package manager feature allows developers to simplify application consumption, making it easy to integrate software packages into development workflows. However, it was detected that the software package might abuse this feature to hijack common operating system commands. Attackers often hijack system commands to ensure that their malicious application gets executed before the intended one. This allows the attackers to modify application runtime parameters, or to collect sensitive information that gets passed to trusted applications.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Investigate reported detections as indicators of software tampering.
  • Consider rewriting the package manifest without overriding operating system commands.

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: 203K
  • Nuget: 735K
  • PyPi: 838K
  • NPM: 5.12M
  • VS Code: 113K
  • PS Gallery: 17K

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).