Beware: GitHub's Fake Popularity Scam Tricking Developers into Downloading Malware
Apr 10, 2024
Software Security / Supply Chain Attack
Threat actors are now taking advantage of GitHub's search functionality to trick unsuspecting users looking for popular repositories into downloading spurious counterparts that serve malware. The latest assault on the open-source software supply chain involves concealing malicious code within Microsoft Visual Code project files that's designed to download next-stage payloads from a remote URL, Checkmarx said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Attackers create malicious repositories with popular names and topics, using techniques like automated updates and fake stars to boost search rankings and deceive users," security researcher Yehuda Gelb said. The idea is to manipulate the search rankings in GitHub and bring threat actor-controlled repositories to the top when users filter and sort their results based on the most recent updates by consistently committing small changes to a file named "log," and increase the popularity via bogus stars added v...
