Skip to main content

TH16601

Detected presence of software installers that perform unusual actions.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
failhighhigh1tampering: fail
Reason: dangerous install procedures

About the issue​

Most software applications use standardized installation formats for their distribution. Software installers are built from instructions written within installation scripts that act as blueprints for the distribution format assembly. Installation scripts declare the most important software properties, such as the default installation location, its external dependencies, and various actions that may occur during the installation process. Actions defined within the installation script are executed automatically during events such as software deployment, update, or removal. These events are used by software developers to set up the environment for nominal software use, or to perform cleanup upon software removal. However, installation scripts are commonly abused by threat actors to execute arbitrary commands on the deployment machine. It was detected that an installation script could execute commands that are not typically used during software installation. Such unusual commands resemble common threat actor tactics and are usually obscured by layers of cryptography, 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 installation procedure 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).