On August 8, 2023, the.NET community was informed that the testing library called Moq exfiltrates developer's emails from their development machine and sends them off to third-party remote servers. Snyk has already published a security advisory and will alert developers who scan and monitor their.NET projects with Snyk.

The JFrog Security Research team recently discovered a new malware payload in the PyPI repository, written in C#. This is uncommon since PyPI is primarily a repository for Python packages, and its codebase consists mostly of Python code, or natively compiled libraries used by Python programs. This finding raised our concerns about the potential for cross-language malware attacks.

Malicious packages are often spread by the open source NPM and PyPI package repositories, with few other repositories affected. Specifically – there was no public evidence of severe malicious activity in the NuGet repository other than spam packages used for spreading phishing links. As with other repositories, the JFrog Security Research team regularly monitors the NuGet repository for malicious packages, including manual analysis of suspicious code.

Containerization with Docker has become a major trend in web application development that many.NET developers have adopted. There are many compelling advantages for developers and DevOps engineers to containerize.NET applications, even when working with the older.NET Framework 4.x versions. However, if we don’t know how to use containers properly, we’ll experience little benefit from them.