Apparently there’s a bunch of projects getting hit with this, fairly obscure ones though. Project gets forked, suddenly get a pile of stars more than the original, and then there’s a curl-bash pipe inserted into it that runs some ransomeware that encrypts ~/Documents.
About a dozen other projects linked in here from another developer (excuse the Reddit link): https://old.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1jbzuot/someone_copied_our_github_project_made_it_look/
…the fuck is that title? I got a headache trying to make sense of it.
Yah, I read it afterwards and realized I’d verbed a noun. I’m not proud of it.
Here in Lemmy you can edit titles
Finally, Linux is popular enough to get targeted by malware!
lol, just checked. ~/Documents doesn’t even exist on my machine.
Me neither, I nuke the default freedesktop folders on an install because they clutter up my home folder. But I’d imagine we’re the exception.
This isn’t really a supply chain attack. It’s more social engineering: fake users, forks, and non-verified code. They’re taking advantage of the fact that most people don’t use verified releases or packages code from open source projects.
GitHub is not compromised, nor sending unintended payloads.
Many of the projects are backend dev tools, like the Atlas provider linked in the thread.
But that’s not a supply chain attack. If projects or platforms are compromised and THEN their code is used by normal means of ingestion of said project, that would be a supply chain attack.
These are unofficial channels created as forks of existing projects in an attempt to fool users into using these instead.
OK, fair enough, I changed the title.
Another reason that star count is a terrible metric for quality / authenticity. Fake stars are a huge problem that not a lot of people take seriously.
Jokes on them, I don’t keep shit in ~/Documents, all my goodies are on a network share mounted at ~/Netstore
Hahaha. Was about to comment nearly the same thing. My NFS share has a different mount.
~/Documentsis an empty directory
I keep saying this curl bash pipe shit needs to stop.
Yes, I agree, but then, what would be an alternative?
Store it into a file, chmod it and run it? git clone the repo and run a script from it? I don’t think any of those would be different, apart from having more steps most people won’t even check anything.
I don’t know if we can fix this while allowing people to run stuff they don’t understand on their machines. Maybe community curated scripts or something, know the people who does the stuff and only run stuff made by people you already know.
I think we’re running too fast, we need to chill down, idk.
Yes, I agree, but then, what would be an alternative?
Any package manager that allows for ways to verify the source. These shitty script|bash lines are doing all sorts of nutty shit on your system, and that’s ones that aren’t even malicious.
That simply wouldn’t work in non-english machines lmao
Maybe they’re using xdg-dirs? That might work, won’t it?
Removed by mod
I tried that, I ended up with this weird “Windows 11” adware installed and couldn’t get rid of it. There was also a problem with odd programs and advertising showing up in my Start Menu, even after I removed them. Also, my settings would occasionally just change, without my knowledge or permission.
Sounds legit, thank you.
You can’t get a virus if your computer’s already dependent on one!
I’d rather have ass-cancer.
