Lotusbail npm package found to be harvesting WhatsApp messages and contacts

https://www.koi.ai/blog/npm-package-with-56k-downloads-malware-stealing-whatsapp-messages

by sohkamyung • 7 months ago

323 211 7 months ago

koi.ai

runningmike• 7 months ago

Popularity is never a metric for security or quality….Always verify.

k8sToGo• 7 months ago

But... GitHub stars!

criddell• 7 months ago

Verify? Verify what?

user342832• 7 months ago

Verify what? I certainly don't have the capacity to thoroughly review my every dependency's source code in order to detect potentially hidden malware.

In this case more realistic advice would probably be to either rely on a more popular package to benefit from swarm intelligence, or creating your own implementation.

bdangubic2• 7 months ago

also scrutinize every dependency you introduce. I have seen sooooo many dependencies over the years where a library was brought in for one or two things which you can write yourself in 5 minutes (e.g. commons-lang to use null-safe string compare or contains only)

sneak4• 7 months ago

Over a certain popularity it is. 56k downloads is nowhere near the threshold.

fooker• 7 months ago

56k Downloads?

That seems ..low..?

Eji1700• 7 months ago

It also seems weird that people are only scanning code that breaks?

I have 0 cred in anything security, so maybe i'm just missing a bigger picture thing, but like...if you told me i had to make some sort of malicious NPM package and get people to use it, i'd probably just find something that works, copy the code, put in some stylistic changes, and then bury my malicious code in there?

This seems so obvious that I question if the OP is correct in stating people aren't looking for that, or maybe I misunderstand what they mean because i'm ignorant?

pixl977• 7 months ago

It also seems weird that people are only scanning code that breaks?

That's how the xz exploit was caught.

outofpaper• 7 months ago

Feels almost SEO. 56k used to be the top speed for models. It was L33t.

peacebeard2• 7 months ago

Wow that AI art looks terrible.

ilio• 7 months ago

Lots of signs of AI writing also: “not this, but that” constructions everywhere. The first paragraph in Final Thoughts is pure ChatGPT.

It’s hard to read any blog anymore without trying to work out which part is actually from a human.

canyp• 7 months ago

Soon the only way to assure your readers that your writing is human is by calling them a motherfucker in the opening sentence.

But then, you'd only be sure that the first sentence was legitimate and not the rest of the article. That is why I constantly reassure my readers that they're some goddamn motherfuckers throughout my writing. And you, too, are one, my friend.

BubbleRings• 7 months ago

So is there a list of the most popular apps that made use of the infected lotusbail npm package?

baobun• 7 months ago

NPM show 0 dependents in public packages. The 56k downloads number can easily have been be gamed by automation and therefore not a reliable signal of popularity.

montague27• 7 months ago

Is there an increasing trend of supply chain attacks? What can developers do to mitigate the impact?

HighGoldstein• 7 months ago

Mitigate? Stop using random packages. Prevent? Stop using NPM and similar package ecosystems altogether.

metaltyphoon2• 7 months ago

and similar package ecosystems altogether

Realistically, this is impossible.

anthk• 7 months ago

Does this happen with CPAN?

At least they seemed to have policies:

https://security.metacpan.org/

cromka4• 7 months ago

That package wasn't any more random than any other NodeJS package. NPM isn't inherently different from, say, Debian repositories, except the latter have oversight and stewardship and scrutiny.

That's what's needed and I am seriously surprised NPM is trusted like it is. And I am seriously surprised developers aren't afraid of being sued for shipping malware to people.

christophilus4• 7 months ago

Review and vendor your dependencies like it’s 1999.

embedding-shape2• 7 months ago

If you have to run it regardless, contain it as good as you could, given the potential impact. If you're not using the same machine for anything else, maybe "good riddance" is the way to go? Otherwise try to sandbox it, understanding the tradeoffs and (still) risks. Easiest for now is just run everything in rootless podman containers (or similar), which is relatively easy. Otherwise VMs, or other machines. All depends on what effort you feel is worth it, so really what it is your are protecting.

spot• 7 months ago

use dependabot with cooldown.

hakcermani• 7 months ago

Are many of the packages obfuscated? Seems like here the server url was heavily obfuscated and encrypted, that is a big warning flag is it not. Auto scanning a submitted package and flagging off obfuscated / binary payloads / install scripts for further inspection could help. Am wondering how such packages get automatically promoted for distribution ..

throw-12-168• 7 months ago

Yes, and even more so now that we are vibe coding codebases with piles of random deps that nobody even bothers to look at.

You can mitigate it by fully containerizing your dev env, locking your deps, enabling security scans, and manually updating your deps on a lagging schedule.

Never use npm global deps, pretty much the worst thing you can do in this situation.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 7 months ago

the kind of dependency developers install without a second thought

Kind of a terrifying statement, right there.

sneak4• 7 months ago

Every docker image specified in a k8s yml or docker-compose file or github action that doesn’t end in :sha256@<hash> (ie specifying a label) is one “docker push” away from a compromise, given that tags/labels are not cryptographically specified. You’re just trusting DockerHub and the publisher (or anyone with their creds) to not rug you.

The industry runs on a lot more unexamined trust than people think.

They’re deployed automatically by machine, which definitionally can’t even give it a second thought. The upstream trust is literally specified in code, to be reused constantly automatically. You could get owned in your sleep without doing anything just because a publisher got phished one day.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 7 months ago

That's one reason I barely use any dependencies. I'm forced to use a couple, but I tend to "roll my own," quite a bit.

Well, I should qualify that. I do use quite a few dependencies, but they are ones that I wrote.

OptionOfT• 7 months ago

Pinning a GitHub Actions action doesn't prevent the action itself from doing an apt install, npm install or running a Docker image that is not pinned.

Muromec5• 7 months ago

I have to trust the publisher, otherwise I can't update and I have to update because CVE's exist. If we step back, how do I even know that the image blessed with hardcoded hash (doublechecked with the website of whoever is supposed to publish it) isn't backdored now?

sublinear• 7 months ago

It's also hyperbole

josephg9• 7 months ago

I've worked in plenty of javascript shops and unfortunately its not so far off the mark. Its quite common to see JS projects with thousands of transitive dependencies. I've seen the same in python too.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 7 months ago

I'm not so sure about that.

I've watched developers judge dependencies by GH stars, and "shiny" quotient.

On a completely unrelated tangent, I remember reading about a "GH Stars as a Service" outfit. I don't see any way that could be abused, though.../s

pixl977• 7 months ago

Until you start doing SBOM and seeing what developers are pulling out in the field.

agentifysh2• 7 months ago

yeah i mean this is a tough problem. unless you work for a government contractor where they have strict security policies, most devs are just going to run npm install without a second thought as there are a lot of packages.

i dont know what the solution here is other than stop using npm

irishcoffee5• 7 months ago

unless you work for a government contractor where they have strict security policies

... So you're saying there is a blueprint for mitigating this already, and it just isn't followed?

miroljub• 7 months ago

The issue with npm is JS doesn't have a stdlib, so developers need to rely on npm and third party libs even for things stdlib provide in languages like Java, Python, Go, ...

josephg9• 7 months ago

i dont know what the solution here is other than stop using npm

Personally I think we need to start adding capability based systems into our programming languages. Random code shouldn't have "ambient authority" to just do anything on my computer with the same privileges as me. Like, if a function has this signature:

    function add(a: int, b: int) -> int

Then it should only be able to read its input, and return any integer it wants. But it shouldn't get ambient authority to access anything else on my computer. No network access. No filesystem. Nothing.

Philosophically, I kind of think of it like function arguments and globals. If I call a function foo(someobj), then function foo is explicitly given access to someobj. And it also has access to any globals in my program. But we generally consider globals to be smelly. Passing data explicitly is better.

But the whole filesystem is essentially available as a global that any function, anywhere, can access. With full user permissions. I say no. I want languages where the filesystem itself (or a subset of it) can be passed as an argument. And if a function doesn't get passed a filesystem, it can't access a filesystem. If a function isn't passed a network socket, it can't just create one out of nothing.

I don't think it would be that onerous. The main function would get passed "the whole operating system" in a sense - like the filesystem and so on. And then it can pass files and sockets and whatnot to functions that need access to that stuff.

If we build something like that, we should be able to build something like npm but where you don't need to trust the developers of 3rd party software so much. The current system of trusting everyone with everything is insane.

____tom____• 7 months ago

Developing in a container might mitigate a lot of issues. Harder to compromise your development machine.

I guess if you ship it you are still passing along contagion

btbuildem• 7 months ago

It's terrifying because it's true for a majority of developers.

cxr7• 7 months ago

At this point, the existence of these attacks should be an expected outcome. (It should have been expected even without the empirical record we now have and the multiple times that we can now cite.)

NPM and NPM-style package managers that are designed to late-fetch dependencies just before build-time are already fundamentally broken. They're an end-run around the underlying version control system, all in favor of an ill-considered, half-baked scheme to implement an alternative approach to version control of the package manager project maintainers' devising.

And they provide cover for attacks like this, because they encourage a culture where, because one's dependencies are all "over there", the massive surface area gets swept under the rug and they never get reviewed (because 56K NPM users can't be wrong).

montroser4• 7 months ago

I agree with much of what you said here, but is it really just about the package manager? If I had specified this repo's git url with a specific version number or sha directly in my package.json, the outcome would be just about the same. And so that's not really an end-run around version control at that point. Even with npm out of the picture the problem is still there.

Gigachad5• 7 months ago

The root problem is the OS allows npm packages to grab your WhatsApp messages without the user knowing.

cxr7• 7 months ago

If I had specified this repo's git url with a specific version number or sha directly in my package.json[…] that's not really an end-run around version control at that point

Yes it is. Git doesn't operate based on package.json.

You're still trying to devise a scheme where, instead of Git tracking the source code of what you're building and deploying and/or turning into a release, you're excluding parts of that content from Git's purview. That's doing an end-run around the VCS.

josephg9• 7 months ago

They're an end-run around the underlying version control system

I assume by "underlying version control system" you mean apt, rpm, homebrew and friends? They don't solve this problem either. Nobody in the opensource world is auditing code for you. Compromised xz still made it into apt. Who knows how many other packages are compromised in a similar way?

Also, apt and friends don't solve the problem that npm, cargo, pip and so on solve. I'm writing some software. I want to depend on some package X at version Y (eg numpy, serde, react, whatever). I want to use that package, at that version, on all supported platforms. Debian. Ubuntu. Redhat. MacOS. And so on. Try and do that using the system package manager and you're in a world of hurt. "Oh, your system only has official packages for SDL2, not SDL3. Maybe move your entire computer to an unustable branch of ubuntu to fix it?" / "Yeah, we don't have that python package in homebrew. Maybe you could add it and maintain it yourself?" / "New ticket: I'm trying to run your software in gentoo, but it only has an earlier version of dependency Y."

Hell. Utter hell.

__MatrixMan__2• 7 months ago

...unless your system package manager is nix.

cxr7• 7 months ago

I assume by "underlying version control system" you mean apt, rpm, homebrew and friends

No. Git.

array_key_first2• 7 months ago

No, other trusted repositories are legitimately better because the maintainers built the software themselves. They don't purely rely on binaries from the original developer.

It's not perfect and bad things still make it through, but just look at your example - XZ. This never made it into Debian stable repositories and it was caught remarkably quickly. Meanwhile, we have NPM vulnerability after vulnerability.

WD-42• 7 months ago

I think you missed the mark a bit here. This wasn’t a dependency that was compromised, it was a dep that was malicious from the start. Package manager doesn’t really play into this. Even if this package was vendored the outcome would have been the same.

cromka4• 7 months ago

No, package manager actually DOES play into this. Or, rather, the way best practices it enforces do. I would be seriously surprised if debian shipped malware, because the package manager is configured with debian repos by default and you know you can trust these to have a very strict oversight.

If apt's DNA was to download package binaries straight from Github, then I would blame it on the package manager for making it so inherently easy to download malware, wouldn't I?

cxr7• 7 months ago

I think you missed the mark a bit here. This wasn’t a dependency that was compromised, it was a dep that was malicious from the start.

You're making assumptions that I am making assumptions, but I wasn't making assumptions. I understand the attack.

Package manager doesn’t really play into this.

It does, for the reasons I described.

stefan_bobev2• 7 months ago

I am slowly waking up to the realization that we (software engineers) are laughably bad at security. I used to think that it was only NPM (I have worked a lot in this ecosystem over the years), but I have found this to be essentially everywhere: NPM is a poster child for this because of executable scripts on install, but every package manager essentially boils down to "Install this thing by name, no security checks". Every ecosystem I touch now (apart from gamedev, but only because I roll everything myself there by choice) has this - e.g Cargo has a lot of "tools" that you install globally so that you get some capability (like flamegraphs, asm output, test runners etc.) - this is the same vulnerability, manifesting slightly differently. Like others have pointed out, it is common to just pull random Docker images via Helm charts. It is also common to get random "utility" tools during builds in CI/CD pipelines, just by curl-ing random URLs of various "release archives". You don't even have to look too hard - this is surface level in pretty much every company, almost every industry (I have my doubts about the security theatre in some, but I have no first hand experience, so cannot say)

The issue I have is that I don't really have a good idea for a solution to this problem - on one hand, I don't expect everyone to roll the entire modern stacks by hand every time. Killing collaborative software development seems like literally throwing the baby out with the bath water. On the other hand, I feel like nothing I touch is "secure" in any real sense - the tick boxes are there, and they are all checked, but I don't think a single one of them really protects me against anything - most of the time, the monster is already inside the house.

Cyph0n• 7 months ago

I think the solution is a build system that requires version pinning - options include Nix, Bazel, and Buck.

Muromec5• 7 months ago

The issue I have is that I don't really have a good idea for a solution to this problem - on one hand, I don't expect everyone to roll the entire modern stacks by hand every time. Killing collaborative software development seems like literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Is NPM really collaborative? People just throw stuff out there and you can pick it up. It's the least commons denominator of collaboration.

The thing that NPM is missing is trust and trust doesn't scale to 1000x dependencies.

nicoburns3• 7 months ago

IMO the solution is auditing. We should be auditing every single version of every single dependency before we use it. Not necessarily personally, but we could have a review system like Ebay/Uber/AirBnB and require N trusted reviews.

Jarwain• 7 months ago

Something that I keep thinking about is spec driven design.

If, for code, there is a parallel "state" document with the intent behind each line of code, each function

And in conjunction that state document is connected to a "higher layer of abstraction" document (recursively up as needed) to tie in higher layers of intent

Such a thing would make it easier to surface weird behavior imo, alongside general "spec driven design" perks. More human readable = more eyes, and potential for automated LLM analysis too.

I'm not sure it'd be _Perfect_, but I think it'd be loads better than what we've got now

jmward01• 7 months ago

There are so many package managers out there for different platforms. I feel like there should be some more general, standardized, package manager that is language agnostic. Something that: - has some guarantees about dependencies - has some guarantees about provenance (only allow if signed by x, y, z kind of thing) - has a standardized api so corporate or third party curation of packages is possible (I want my own company package manager that I curate) - does ????

I don't know, it just seems like every tech area has these problems and I honestly don't understand why there aren't more 'standardized' solutions here

LtWorf3• 7 months ago

They exist and are called "linux distributions". Developers hate them.

agentifysh2• 7 months ago

wonder if this is possible with flutter packages or python? im looking to slowly get away from javascript ecosystem.

ive started using Flutter even for web applications as well, works pretty well, still use Astro/React tho for frontend websites so I can't completely get away from it.

paularmstrong2• 7 months ago

The code is literally right there for you. It doesn't matter what ecosystem or package manager. Someone could distribute the same thing anywhere — it's up to those pulling it in to actually start auditing what they're accepting.

johnny22• 7 months ago

yes it is possible with rust, python, php, and likely many others

The_President3• 7 months ago

PyPI has had compromised or fake packages in the past.

esafak• 7 months ago

Did any other scanner catch this, and when? A detection lag leaderboard would be neat.

rglover• 7 months ago

Microsoft either needs to become a better steward of NPM or hand it off to a foundation that can properly maintain it.

The_President3• 7 months ago

Good plan - I'm sure they'll get right on it after solving the virus and malware issues on their mainline OS.

Aeolun• 7 months ago

They’ve only had like 30 years. You need to give them some time!

anonzzzies2• 7 months ago

If they really believe their AI is that good and security practices and tooling that solid, why can't they automatically flag this stuff? I am sure they can, but once flagged a human has to check and that seems costly?

Muromec5• 7 months ago

There is no AI, it's all a scam.

Gigachad5• 7 months ago

It probably could. But I assume with even a small amount of indirection added it no longer would be able to pick it up.

ashishb3• 7 months ago

JavaScript fanatics will downvote me, but I will say again. JavaScript is meant to be run in an untrusted environment (think browser), and running it in any form of trusted environment increases the risk drastically [1]

The language is too hard to do a meaningful static analysis. This particular attack is much harder (though not impossible) to execute in Java, Go, or Rust-based packages.

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/javascript/

tantalor• 7 months ago

Even in a browser, a compromised JS payload can put your user's data and privacy at risk.

ashishb3• 7 months ago

Even in a browser, a compromised JS payload can put your user's data and privacy at risk.

True. In a backend, however, a compromised payload can put all of user's and your non-user data at risk.

mcintyre1994• 7 months ago

In what way is it harder to write a library that exfiltrates credentials passed to it in those languages? I’d think it’d be a bit easier because you could use the standard library instead of custom encryption, but otherwise pretty much the same.

ashishb3• 7 months ago

In what way is it harder to write a library that exfiltrates credentials passed to it in those languages?

It is not harder to write. It is more challenging to execute this attack stealthily.

Due to the myriad behaviors of runtimes (browser vs. backend), frameworks (and their numerous versions), and over-dependency on external dependencies (e.g., leftpad), the risk in JS-based backends increases significantly.

evdubs• 7 months ago

Is there no Apache Commons for Javascript? It'd be nice to have a large library from a 'trusted' group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Commons

schneehertz• 7 months ago

No matter how large the library, it won't include WhatsApp's API

The_President3• 7 months ago

Recently audited a software plan created by an AI tool. NPM dependencies as far as the eye can see. I can only imagine the daunting liability concerns if the suggested "engineering" style was actually put forth to be used in production across the wide userbase. That said, the process of the user creating the "draft" codebase gave them a better understanding of scope of work necessary.

tekacs3• 7 months ago

Just to talk about a different direction here for a second:

Something that I find to be a frustrating side effect of malware issues like this is that it seems to result in well-intentioned security teams locking down the data in apps.

The justification is quite plausible -- in this case WhatsApp messages were being stolen! But the thing is... that if this isn't what they steal they'll steal something else.

Meanwhile locking down those apps so the only apps with a certain signature can read from your WhatsApp means that if you want to back up your messages or read them for any legitimate purpose you're now SOL, or reliant on a usually slow, non-automatable UI-only flow.

I'm glad that modern computers are more secure than they have been, but I think that defense in depth by locking down everything and creating more silos is a problem of its own.

vlovich123• 7 months ago

The OS should be mediating such access where it explicitly asks your permission for an app to access data belonging to another publisher.

bhhaskin2• 7 months ago

This sounds great on paper, but what happens when the OS isn't working for the user like Windows?

tekacs3• 7 months ago

I could certainly see the value in this in principle but sadly the labyrinthine mess that is the Apple permission system (in which they learned none of the lessons of early UAC) illustrates the kind of result that seems to arise from this.

A great microcosm illustration of this is automation permission on macOS right now: there's a separate allow dialog for every single app. If you try to use a general purpose automation app it needs to request permission for every single app on your computer individually the first time you use it. Having experienced that in practice it... absolutely sucks.

At this point it makes me feel like we need something like an async audit API. Maybe the OS just tracks and logs all of your apps' activity and then:

1) You can view it of course.

2) The OS monitors for deviations from expected patterns for that app globally (kinda like Microsoft's SmartScreen?)

3) Your own apps can get permission to read this audit log if you want to analyze it your own way and/or be more secure. If you're more paranoid maybe you could use a variant that kills an app in a hurry if it's misbehaving.

Sadly you can't even implement this as a third party thing on macOS at this point because the security model prohibits you from monitoring other apps. You can't even do it with the user's permission because tracing apps requires you to turn SIP off.

Gigachad5• 7 months ago

MacOS does this. It has a popup to grant access to folders like documents.

ikekkdcjkfke• 7 months ago

Time vibe code our own freakin OS with sane defaults. Use the linux kernel as a base for hardware support

there_is_try• 7 months ago

I don't really know what I'm doing, but. Why couldn't messages be stored encrypted on a blockchain with a system where both user's in a one-one conversation agree to a key, or have their own keys, that grants permission for 'their' messages. And then you'd never be locked into a private software / private database / private protocol. You could read your messages at any point with your key.

aetherspawn• 7 months ago

I hope we all have the same change in sentiment about AI in 3 years from now!

userbinator• 7 months ago

...and this gives them more control, so they can profit from it. Corporate greed knows no bounds.

I'm glad that modern computers are more secure than they have been

I'm not. Back when malware was more prevalent among the lower class, there was also far more freedom and interoperability.

oefrha• 7 months ago

Back when malware was more prevalent among the lower class, there was also far more freedom and interoperability.

Yeah, “the lower class” had the freedom of having their IM accounts hacked and blast spam/scam messages to all contacts all the time. How nostalgic.

hmokiguess• 7 months ago

xkcd covers this really well: https://xkcd.com/2044/

__jonas• 7 months ago

I agree with this, just to note for context though: This (or rather the package that was forked) is not a wrapper of any official WhatsApp API or anything like that, it poses as a WhatsApp client (WhatsApp Web), which the author reverse engineered the protocol of.

So users go through the same steps as if they were connecting another client to their WhatsApp account, and the client gets full access to all data of course.

From what I understand WhatsApp is already fairly locked down, so people had to resort to this sort of thing – if WA had actually offered this data via a proper API with granular permissions, there might have been a lower chance of this happening.

See: https://baileys.wiki/docs/intro/

charcircuit• 7 months ago

Right, it would need to use an integrity API to prohibit 3rd party clients.

blell• 7 months ago

I imagine the average HN commenter seeing every new story being posted and thinking "how could I criticise big tech using this"

tekacs3• 7 months ago

That's the funny thing about those here in the spirit of Hacker News. We want to build – to hack.

It's all well and good for us all to use Linux to side-step this, but sometimes (shock, horror), we even want to _share_ those hacks with other people!

As such, it's kinda nice if the Big Tech software on those devices didn't lock all of our friends in tiny padded cells 'for their own safety'.

nicoburns3• 7 months ago

I'm pretty sure WhatsApp does this for anti-competitive reasons not security reasons.

hopelite• 7 months ago

It seems to me the only adequate solution regarding any of these types of security and privacy vs data sharing and access matters, is going to be an OS and system level agent that can identify and question behaviors and data flows (AI firewall and packet inspection?), and configure systems in line with the user’s accepted level of risk and privacy.

It is already a major security and privacy risk for users to rely on the beneficence and competence of developers (let alone corporations and their constant shady practices/rug-pulls), as all the recent malware and large scale supply chain compromises have shown. I find the only acceptable solution would be to use AI to help users (and devs, for that matter) navigate and manage the exponential complexity of privacy and security.

For a practical example, imagine your iOS AI Agent notifying you that as you had requested, it is informing you that it adjusted the Facebook data sharing settings because the SOBs changed them to be more permissive again after the last update. It may even then suggest that since this is the 5685th shady incident by Facebook, that it may be time to adjust the position towards what to share on Facebook.

That could also extend to the subject story; where one’s agent blocks and warns of the behavior of a library an app uses, which is exfiltrating WhatsApp messages/data and sending it off device.

Ideally such malicious code will soon also be identified way sooner as AI agents can become code reviewers, QA, and even maintainers of open source packages/libraries, which would intercept such behaviors well before being made available; but ultimately, I believe it should all become a function of the user’s agent looking out for their best interests on the individual level. We simply cannot sustain “trust me, bro” security and privacy anymore…especially since as has been demonstrated quite clearly, you cannot trust anyone anymore in the west, whether due to deliberate or accidental actions, because the social compact has totally broken down… you’re on your own… just you and your army of AI agents in the matrix.

anonzzzies2• 7 months ago

I had some dependency of a dependency installing crypto miners: it was pretty scary as we have not had this since wordpress. I saw a lot more people having this issue (there is a weird process consuming all my cpu). Like someone here already says: we need an Apache / NPM commons and when packages use anything outside those, big fat alarm bells should chime.

no-name-here2• 7 months ago

As others pointed out elsewhere, that wouldn’t have helped in this case as presumably it wouldn’t include a WhatsApp API, the purpose of this package. But it could help in general, sure.

edoceo• 7 months ago

Once again, just having a better supply chain tool, just reviewing the changed packages could mitigate. Maybe hold back some of the dependencies of dependencies would mitigate.

Why aren't more teams putting some tool in-front of their blind-installs from NPM (et al)

antiloper• 7 months ago

Was anyone actually affected by this? Is this package a dependency of some popular package?

I assume the answer is no because this is clearly clickbait AI slop but who knows.

llmslave24• 7 months ago

If one relies on the JS ecosystem to put food on the table and can't realistically make changes at their job to mitigate this, short of developing on a second airgapped work-only computer what can developers do to at least partially mitigate the risk? I've heard others mention doing all development in docker containers. Perhaps using a Linux VM?

morshu90013• 7 months ago

If you're distributing something that uses this package, it's not just your dev computer at risk, it's all the users.

llmslave24• 7 months ago

I'm aware thanks, but if your company is doing the standard practice of using 10k dependencies for some JS webslop you don't really have any other options but to protect yourself.

ryanto2• 7 months ago

I run incus os, which is an operating system that is made for spinning up containers and VMs. Whenever I have to work on a JS project I launch a new container for development and then ssh into it from my laptop. You can also run incus on your computer without installing it as an operating system.

Containers still have some risk since they share the host kernel, but they're a pretty good choice for protection against the types of attacks we see in the JS ecosystem. I'll switch to VM's when we start seeing container escape exploits being published as npm packages :)

When I first started doing development this way it felt like I was being a bit too paranoid, but honestly it's so fast and easy it's not at all noticeable. I often have to work on projects that use outdated package managers and have hundreds of top-level dependencies, so it's worth the setup in my opinion.

llmslave24• 7 months ago

Amazing suggestion. So you're running it inside a Docker container or something? I'm going to try this out. I guess the alternative is a VPS if all else fails.

christophilus4• 7 months ago

I do the same thing. Podman all the things.

throw-12-168• 7 months ago

I'm waiting for container escapes too, its only a matter of time.

Haven't seen any in the wild, but i built a few poc's just to prove to myself that I wasn't being overly paranoid.

Gigachad5• 7 months ago

Some companies mandate that npm packages have to be x months old. Which gives time for this stuff to be discovered.

no-name-here2• 7 months ago

But none of those would have helped in this case, where each dev/user intentionally installed the package specifically so it could retrieve data from the WhatsApp API.

What would have helped is if the dev/user had the ability for the dev/user to confirm before the code connected to a new domain or IP - api.WhatsApp.com? Approve. JoesServer.com or a random IP? Block. Such functionality could be at the OS or Docker level, etc.

throw-12-168• 7 months ago

I was responsible for dev-ops, ci, workstation security at my previous position.

Containerize all of your dev environments and lock dependency files to only resolve to a specific version of a dependency that is known safe.

Never do global installs directly, ideally don't even install node outside of a container.

Lag dependency updates by a couple weeks, and enable automated security scans like dependabot on GH. Do not allow automated updates, and verify every dependency prior to updating.

If you work on anything remotely sensitive, especially crypto adjacent, expect to be a target and use a dedicated workstation that you wipe regularly.

Sounds tedious, but thats the job.

Alternatively you could find a job outside the JS ecosystem, you'll likely get a pay bump too.

llmslave24• 7 months ago

Alternatively you could find a job outside the JS ecosystem

In this economy? I'll take any job lol.

I think I'm gonna skip the containers and go straight for a VPS. And keep everything completely sandboxed. My editor's can work via SSH anyways.

cromka4• 7 months ago

I am seriously surprised developers trust NodeJS to this extend and aren't afraid of being sued for inadvertently shipping malware to people.

It's got to be a matter of time, doesn't it, before some software company gets in serious trouble because of that. Or, NPM actually implements some serious stewardship process in place.

paularmstrong2• 7 months ago

This has nothing to do with NodeJS or NPM. The code is freely distributed, just like any open source repo or package manager may provide. The onus is on those who use it to audit what it actually does.

cromka4• 7 months ago

It absolutely does have to do with it. If we continued to ship software libraries like we still do on Linux, then you wouldn't be downloading its releases straight from the source repo, but rather have someone package and maintain them.

Except at the granularity of NodeJS packages, it would be nearly impossible to do.

Eduard3• 7 months ago

as of this writing, the alleged malware/project is still available on npm and GitHub. I'm surprised koi.ai does not mention in their article if they have reported their findings to npm/GitHub.

e12e• 7 months ago

The lotusbail npm package presents itself as a WhatsApp Web API library - a fork of the legitimate @whiskeysockets/baileys package.
The package has been available on npm for 6 months and is still live at the time of writing.
(...) malware that steals your WhatsApp credentials, intercepts every message, harvests your contacts, installs a persistent backdoor, and encrypts everything before sending it to the threat actor's server.

jameslk2• 7 months ago

Malicious libraries will drive more code to be written by LLMs. Currently, malicious libraries seem to be typically trivial libraries. A WhatsApp API library is just on the edge of something that can be vibe coded, and avoiding getting pwned may be a good enough tipping point to embrace NIH syndrome more and more, which I think would be a net negative for F/OSS

The incentives are aligned with the AI models companies, which benefit from using more tokens to code something from scratch

Security issues will simply move to LLM related security holes

Kwpolska2• 7 months ago

The library in question is a malicious fork of a library which reverse engineered the undocumented WhatsApp Web API. Good luck making a slop generator reverse engineer an API.

jameslk2• 7 months ago

I would wager LLMs in a good enough tool/eval loop would actually do pretty well at that task. But they may also be pretty good at just replicating existing libraries wholesale, sans the malicious bits

scotty79• 7 months ago

Traditional security doesn't catch this.
const backdoorCode = crypto.AES.decrypt( "U2FsdGVkX1+LgFmBqo3Wg0zTlHXoebkTRtjmU0cq9Fs=", "ERROR_FILE" ).toString(crypto.enc.Utf8);

Really? Isn't random garbage string pretty strong indication of someone doing something suspicious?

pixl977• 7 months ago

I mean there are a number of tools that look for things like high entropy strings and other crypto keys.

j45• 7 months ago

Almost need to run each npm package isolated to the extent possible, or something equivalent.

paul_h• 7 months ago

isolated-vm (https://www.npmjs.com/package/isolated-vm) here we come for increased sandboxing of node bits and pieces? And we are a year after Java took out the security manager that could sandbox jars in separate classloaders - a standout feature since 1995.

throw-12-168• 7 months ago

NPM was a mistake.

We created a minefield of abandonware and called it an ecosystem.

SoftTalker3• 7 months ago

Or perhaps it was all by design?

gloxkiqcza• 7 months ago

Using this package is a security failure from the beginning. It doesn’t use the public WhatsApp API, it reimplements the official WhatsApp client auth. Authentication uses a shared secret and it’s obvious that you as a third party obtaining this secret from your users is unsafe and a bad practice (especially if it’s third party code processing it!).

Users should know better as well but you can’t really blame them.

WA• 7 months ago

It doesn’t use the public WhatsApp API, it reimplements the official WhatsApp client auth.

Nothing wrong with that if the official API has less features.

Authentication uses a shared secret and it’s obvious that you as a third party obtaining this secret from your users

What do you mean? Usually, you install such a package to automate WhatsApp for your own account.

Proofread0592• 7 months ago

public WhatsApp API

There is no public WhatsApp API. You need to sign up for "WhatsApp Business Platform" to be able to use an API to interact with WhatsApp.

If there was a real API for WhatsApp, this probably wouldn't have happened.

cogogo2• 7 months ago

I know I shouldn’t but I find it hilarious that whoever wrote this wrote the malware so explicitly. Something about functions like exfiltrateCredentials and clear comments for the backdoor makes me chuckle. They went through all the trouble to detect debuggers and sandboxes and did not even bother to obfuscate the code.

cogogo2• 7 months ago

It also has me musing… do they have good test coverage for their 27 debugging traps? And it must be such a headache to even functionally test your malware. What a time to be alive!

taherm789• 7 months ago

It's not? The code is all obfuscated, the author wrote it for us to demonstrate what's happening.

Etheryte• 7 months ago

The author specifically calls it out in the post, no?

They also left helpful comments in their code marking the malicious sections - professional development practices applied to supply chain attacks. Someone probably has a Jira board for this.

slhck2• 7 months ago

These LLM-generated blogs aren't going away – they're everywhere. And the best part? You can now instantly push out garbage content at no cost. Traditional writing is not just dead. It's legacy. The real marketer doesn't care. He just slops.

imperfectfourth• 7 months ago

it's funny that your comment also feels very LLM-generated.

slhck2• 7 months ago

Um, yes. That's the entire joke.

Lotusbail npm package found to be harvesting WhatsApp messages and contacts

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