Mend Supply Chain Defender reported and blocked dozens of packages from the same author. These packages targeted developers of many companies and frameworks like slack, Cloudflare, Datadog, Metamask, react, Shopify, OpenSea, Angular and more. A dependency confusion attack takes advantage of a software developer’s tendency to pull malicious code from public repositories rather than internal ones.
Two packages of well-known origin were found exfiltrating Windows SAM and SYSTEM files, apparently as part of internal security research rather than a targeted dependency confusion attack. On June 6th, 2022, the Mend research team used Supply Chain Defender to detect and flag two malicious packages from the same author that contained identical code. We alerted npm and the packages were removed within three hours of publication.
Great things happen when the academic world and the software industry work together! Today, we’d like to share a story about our recent collaboration with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, a big science institution in Germany. Back in January, Cris Staicu Ph.D. (Tenure-Track Faculty, CISPA), contacted us about his research on NodeJS and JavaScript.
When relying on a 3rd-party package from a non-commercial entity, there is always the risk of lack of support, especially when it comes to outdated packages and versions. If the package stops being maintained, nobody will implement a new feature we might need or fix a newly-discovered security vulnerability. Consider, for example, CVE-2019-17571. A critical remote code vulnerability which was never fixed in Log4j 1.x, since it was not supported anymore, and only fixed in Log4j 2.x.
All developers are prone to mistakes that leave them open to typosquatting attacks. Tiredness, dirty keyboard, or software issues may lead to typing some letters twice. Everyone would like to see a red screen and alarm coming out of the computer in such a case, but sadly, it doesn’t always work that way with most supply chain attacks.
The JFrog Security research team constantly monitors the npm and PyPI ecosystems for malicious packages that may lead to widespread software supply chain attacks. Last month, we shared a widespread npm attack that targeted users of Azure npm packages. Over the past three weeks, our automated scanners have detected several malicious packages in the npm registry, all using the same payload.
Over the years, as a developer, I’ve built and deployed many applications through digital agencies, side projects, startups, and freelance work. With time-sensitive deadlines, client expectations, and delivery dates to consider, security wasn’t usually top of mind when npm installing an open source package. This often led to reworking and cleanup on deployments that had let in known vulnerabilities, adding to compounding timelines and client disappointment.
GraphQL provides security straight out of the box with validation and type-checking. However, it doesn’t fully address security concerns around APIs. In this article, we’ll learn how to secure GraphQL APIs by building a simple Node.js application using Fastify and GraphQL. According to its official documentation, GraphQL is a graph query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with our data.
