TH30108
Detected presence of software components that are impersonating popular software packages.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | SAFE level | SAFE assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | fail | high | high | 1 | tampering: fail Reason: impersonated components found |
About the issue
Software developers use programming and design knowledge to build reusable software components. Software components are the basic building blocks for modern applications. Software consumed by an enterprise consists of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of open source components. Software developers publish components they have authored to public repositories. Open source communities use code repositories to facilitate project discovery and simplify software deployment. These code repositories use unique component names as identifiers that developers can later use to specify software components required by their applications during the build or run processes. Since component names are manually written down by the developer within the code, it is possible to mistype them. Simple omissions of characters, such as prefixes, suffixes, plurals, hyphens, and underscores can have serious consequences. Unintended software components might get installed - components that might have been authored by a threat actor. Threat actors are constantly poisoning open source repositories with typosquatted components preying on typos by unsuspecting developers. They typically try to impersonate the most popular software components, as most developers will be using them to build their applications.
How to resolve the issue
- Review software component names to ensure there were no accidental package name mistypes.
- If the software component names differ from expected, investigate the build and release environment for software supply chain compromise.
- Avoid using this software package until it is vetted as safe.
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