Researchers uncovered a new batch of malicious npm packages designed to exploit Alibaba developers' tools for cross-platform remote access trojans in a complex, targeted software supply chain cyberattack aimed at Chinese-speaking regions. One of the low-level packages subsequently reaches out to a GitHub repository to download and store a rule engine configuration, which it then uses to execute a malicious payload that subsequently contacts a remote server to fetch additional malware. The identity behind this campaign remains unknown, but the presence of Chinese language comments in the source code combined with GitHub commit timestamps showing a UTC+08:00 offset suggests it may be orchestrated by a Chinese-speaking threat actor targeting Chinese developers using Alibaba Group tools.
The campaign's objective appears to be industrial espionage.
The complete set of packages associated with this campaign includes: lib-mtop, aone-kit, aone-kit-cli, aone-sandbox, local-config-parser, smart-config-manager, cloud-config-fetcher, fast-transform-pipeline, aone-cloud-cli, colder-cli, def-open-client, feedback-ai-sdk, flight-compare-analyzer, lwp-web-client, lzd-unified-station-sdk, open-worker-cli, test-skill-zip, and uniapi-bridge. As an example, unknown threat actors published a poisoned version of mrmustard (0.7.4), a photonic quantum computing Python library from Xanadu, which can steal SSH private keys, AWS credentials, and Kubernetes configurations. A deeper investigation points to the primary maintainer’s GitHub account being compromised, allowing an unauthorized release of the rogue version through probing of project's self-hosted CI runners and exfiltrating its publishing secrets via a webhook[.
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