Open source package with 1 million monthly downloads stole user credentials

The developers are urging all developers who installed version 0.23.3 to take the following steps immediately:

1. Check your installed version:

pip show elementary-data | grep Version

2. If the version is 0.23.3, uninstall it and replace it with the safe version:

pip uninstall elementary-data

pip install elementary-data==0.23.4

In your requirements and lockfiles, pin explicitly to elementary-data==0.23.4.

3. Delete your cache files to avoid any artifacts.

4. Check for the malware’s marker file on any machine where the CLI may have run: If this file is present, the payload executed on that machine.

macOS / Linux: /tmp/.trinny-security-update

Windows: %TEMP%.trinny-security-update

5. Rotate any credentials that were accessible from the environment where 0.23.3 ran – dbt profiles, warehouse credentials, cloud provider keys, API tokens, SSH keys, and the contents of any .env files. CI/CD runners are especially exposed because they typically have broad sets of secrets mounted at runtime.

6. Contact your security team to hunt for unauthorized usage of exposed credentials. The relevant IOCs are at the bottom of this post.

Over the past decade, supply-chain attacks on open source repositories have become increasingly common. In some cases, they have achieved a chain of compromises as the malicious package leads to breaches of users and, from there, breaches resulting from the compromise of the users’ environments.

HD Moore, a hacker with more than four decades of experience and the founder and CEO of runZero, said that user-developed repository workflows, such as GitHub actions, are notorious for hosting vulnerabilities.

It’s a “a major problem for open source projects with open repos,” he said. “It’s really hard to not accidentally create dangerous workflows that can be exploited by an attacker’s pull request.”

He said this package can be used to check for such vulnerabilities.