Ruby Programming Language | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

RubyGems, the official package manager for the Ruby programming language, has become the latest platform to mandate multi-factor authentication (MFA) for popular package maintainers, following the footsteps of  NPM  and  PyPI . To that end, owners of gems with over 180 million total downloads are mandated to turn on MFA effective August 15, 2022. "Users in this category who do not have MFA enabled on the UI and API or UI and gem sign-in level will not be able to edit their profile on the web, perform privileged actions (i.e. push and yank gems, or add and remove gem owners), or sign in on the command line until they configure MFA," RubyGems  noted . What's more, gem maintainers who cross 165 million cumulative downloads are expected to receive reminders to turn on MFA until the download count touches the 180 million thresholds, at which point it will be made mandatory. The development is seen as an attempt by package ecosystems to  bolster the software sup...

The maintainers of the RubyGems package manager have addressed a critical security flaw that could have been abused to remove gems and replace them with rogue versions under specific circumstances. "Due to a bug in the yank action, it was possible for any RubyGems.org user to remove and replace certain gems even if that user was not authorized to do so," RubyGems  said  in a security advisory published on May 6, 2022. RubyGems, like npm for JavaScript and pip for Python, is a  package manager  and a gem hosting service for the Ruby programming language, offering a repository of more than 171,500 libraries. In a nutshell, the flaw in question, tracked as CVE-2022-29176, enabled anyone to pull certain gems and upload different files with the same name, same version number, and different platforms. For this to happen, however, a gem needed to have one or more dashes in its name, where the word before the dash was the name of an attacker-controlled gem, and which w...

You can tell the story of the current state of stolen credential-based attacks in three numbers: Stolen credentials were the #1 attacker action in 2023/24, and the breach vector for 80% of web app attacks . (Source: Verizon). Cybersecurity budgets grew again in 2024, with organizations now spending almost $1,100 per user (Source: Forrester).  Stolen credentials on criminal forums cost as little as $10 (Source: Verizon). Something doesn't add up. So, what's going on? In this article, we'll cover: What's contributing to the huge rise in account compromises linked to stolen creds and why existing approaches aren't working.  The world of murky intelligence on stolen credentials, and how to cut through the noise to find the true positives. Recommendations for security teams to stop attackers from using stolen creds to achieve account takeover. Stolen credential-based attacks are on the rise There's clear evidence that identity attacks are now the #1 cyber threat f...

As developers increasingly embrace off-the-shelf software components into their apps and services, threat actors are abusing open-source repositories such as RubyGems to distribute malicious packages, intended to compromise their computers or backdoor software projects they work on. In the latest research shared with The Hacker News, cybersecurity experts at ReversingLabs revealed over 700 malicious gems — packages written in Ruby programming language — that supply chain attackers were caught recently distributing through the RubyGems repository. The malicious campaign leveraged the typosquatting technique where attackers uploaded intentionally misspelled legitimate packages in hopes that unwitting developers will mistype the name and unintentionally install the malicious library instead. ReversingLabs said the typosquatted packages in question were uploaded to RubyGems between February 16 and February 25, and that most of them have been designed to secretly steal funds by r...