clean-packager

Problem

Proprietary ReversingLabs malware detection algorithms have determined that the software package contains one or more malicious components. The detection was made by either a static byte signature, software component identity, or a complete file hash. This malware detection method is considered highly accurate, and can typically attribute malware to previously discovered software supply chain attacks. It is common to have multiple supply chain attack artifacts that relate to a single malware incident.

Problem

Threat researchers have manually inspected the software package and determined that it contains one or more malicious files. The detection was made by a hash-based file reputation lookup. This malware detection method is considered highly accurate, and can typically identify the malware family by name.

Problem

Software components contain executable code that performs actions implemented during its development. These actions are called behaviors. In the analysis report, behaviors are presented as human-readable descriptions that best match the underlying code intent. While most behaviors are benign, some are exclusively used by malicious software with the intent to cause harm. When a software package matches behavior traits of malicious software, it becomes flagged by security solutions. It is highly likely that the software package was tampered with by a malicious actor or a rogue insider. Detected threat type matches the behaviors typically exhibited by the infostealer malware profile. Infostealers are commonly used to steal sensitive user data such as stored login details, financial information, and other personally identifiable information.

Problem

Software developers use programming and design knowledge to build reusable software components. Software components are the basic building blocks for modern applications. Software consumed by an enterprise consists of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of open source components. Software developers publish components they have authored to public repositories. While a new software project is a welcome addition to the open source community, it is not always prudent to indiscriminately use the latest components when building a commercial application. Irrespective of the software quality, the danger of being the first to try out a new project lies in the fact that the software component may contain novel, currently undetected malicious code. Therefore, it is prudent to review software component behaviors and even try out software component in a sandbox, an environment meant for testing untrusted code.

Prevalence in PyPI community

No prevalence information at this time

Problem

Software license is a legal instrument that governs the use and distribution of software source code and its binary representation. Software publishers have the freedom to choose any commonly used or purposefully written license to publish their work under. While some licenses are liberal and allow almost any kind of distribution, with or without code modification, other licenses are more restrictive and impose rules for their inclusion in other software projects. Copyleft licenses in particular impose substantial restrictions on the licensee. They typically require that any derived works, and even software code that merely interacts with copyleft code, be licensed under the same license. Since copyleft licenses are commonly applied to open source code, their inclusion requires that the entire software package becomes open sourced. For commercial applications, this is typically undesirable. Therefore, the inclusion of copyleft code is commonly avoided or even prohibited by the organization policy.