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TH16603

Detected presence of software installers with unusual networking functionality.

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. It is unusual for certain types of software installers to invoke commands that download additional content from a remote server. Attackers commonly abuse software installers to fetch malicious payloads from public code repositories, file sharing websites, or their own infrastructure. Remotely hosted content is not immutable, allowing the attackers to change the type of malware they deploy at any time.

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

  • RubyGems: 203K
  • Nuget: 735K
  • PyPi: 838K
  • NPM: 5.12M
  • VS Code: 113K
  • PS Gallery: 17K
Statistics are not collected for the TH16603 policy at this time, or not applicable to this type of issue.