Submitted via IRC for SoyCow5743
The Slovak National Security Office (NBU) has identified ten malicious Python libraries uploaded on PyPI — Python Package Index — the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language.
NBU experts say attackers used a technique known as typo-squatting to upload Python libraries with names similar to legitimate packages — e.g.: "urlib" instead of "urllib."
The PyPI repository does not perform any types of security checks or audits when developers upload new libraries to its index, so attackers had no difficulty in uploading the modules online.
Developers who mistyped the package name loaded the malicious libraries in their software's setup scripts.
"These packages contain the exact same code as their upstream package thus their functionality is the same, but the installation script, setup.py, is modified to include a malicious (but relatively benign) code," NBU explained.
[...] Indicators of compromise are available in the NBU security alert.
[...] On a side note, and unrelated to the attack vector, NBU also advises Python developers to avoid using "pip" — a Python package installer — when downloading Python libraries, as pip does not support cryptographic signatures.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Monday September 18 2017, @08:40PM
Well, pulseaudio and systemd's package maintainers at least provide security updates for the malware their upstreams created and get discovered. The package maintainer of bzip in pip will probably not respond with a security update of the package now that malicious code has been discovered. So it has to be removed. Hmm. I guess that would make systemd and pulseaudio haters more happy? Fine then, maintain your local distro with pip instead of apt-get.