Dependency Confusion | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Researchers have identified a dependency confusion vulnerability impacting an archived Apache project called Cordova App Harness . Dependency confusion attacks  take place owing to the fact that package managers check the public repositories before private registries, thus allowing a threat actor to publish a malicious package with the same name to a public package repository. This causes the package manager to inadvertently download the fraudulent package from the public repository instead of the intended private repository. If successful, it can have serious consequences, such as installing all downstream customers that install the package. A May 2023 analysis of npm and PyPI packages stored in cloud environments by cloud security company Orca  revealed  that nearly 49% of organizations are vulnerable to a dependency confusion attack. While npm and other package managers have since introduced fixes to prioritize the private versions, application security firm Legit Security  sa

The maintainers of the PyTorch package have warned users who have installed the nightly builds of the library between December 25, 2022, and December 30, 2022, to uninstall and download the latest versions following a  dependency confusion attack . "PyTorch-nightly Linux packages installed via pip during that time installed a dependency,  torchtriton , which was compromised on the Python Package Index (PyPI) code repository and ran a malicious binary," the PyTorch team  said  in an alert over the weekend. PyTorch, analogous to Keras and TensorFlow, is an open source Python-based machine learning framework that was originally developed by Meta Platforms. The PyTorch team said that it became aware of the malicious dependency on December 30, 4:40 p.m. GMT. The supply chain attack entailed uploading the malware-laced copy of a legitimate dependency named torchtriton to the Python Package Index (PyPI) code repository. Since package managers like pip check public code registr

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

At least 17 malware-laced packages have been discovered on the NPM package Registry, adding to a  recent barrage of malicious software  hosted and delivered through open-source software repositories such as PyPi and RubyGems. DevOps firm JFrog said the libraries, now taken down, were designed to grab Discord access tokens and  environment variables  from users' computers as well as gain full control over a victim's system. "The packages' payloads are varied, ranging from infostealers up to full remote access backdoors," researchers Andrey Polkovnychenko and Shachar Menashe said in a  report  published Wednesday. "Additionally, the packages have different infection tactics, including typosquatting,  dependency confusion  and trojan functionality." The list of packages is below - prerequests-xcode (version 1.0.4) discord-selfbot-v14 (version 12.0.3) discord-lofy (version 11.5.1) discordsystem (version 11.5.1) discord-vilao (version 1.0.0) fix-e