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Kaspersky exposes hidden malware on GitHub stealing personal data
- T3RMINATED 2y ago[dead]
- shakna 2y agoKaspersky is now banned for government use in multiple nations. Whilst there is some good work happening there, as above, for the most part, they should be considered a state actor for Russia. That usually means that they're a threat, and these small good tokens are nothing more than PR efforts. You can't avoid politics, when considering this company.
- Frederation 2y agoWell said.
- etc-hosts 2y agoThe US is on a path to un-ban Russian state affiliated companies. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/us/politics/hegseth-cyber-russia-trump-putin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/us/politics/hegseth-cyber...
- rectang 2y agoThat the Pentagon has announced it will cease defending Americans against Russian threats hardly means that Americans are not threatened.
- somenameforme 2y agoOr it means that the original bans were primarily instituted because of myopic geopolitics and not because of any meaningful threats. In particular US ire towards Kaspersky grew rapidly after it was the only antivirus that picked up on NSA/'equation group' malware. It's similar how the US banned all cooperation with China in space [1] because of some tropes about them being unable to do anything except steal American tech. That's why, to this day, there are no Chinese on the ISS. After that law China proceeded to develop, launch, and man their own space station, put a rover on Mars, and even carry out an unprecedented sample return mission from the dark side of the Moon, and just generally run circles around the US (except perhaps SpaceX) in space. Interestingly US researchers may not be able to access those Moon samples (which China shared with scientists worldwide) due to this stupid law. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
- leoc 2y agoRegardless what the original story behind the Kaspersky ban was, if you genuinely don't think that a Russian antivirus company represents a state-controlled threat to US organisations, public and private, in 2025 then I don't know what to say to you.
- wqaatwt 2y agoNot if US and Russia become “allies”. Then UK/EU companies will become a bigger “threat”. It should go even further e.g. you don’t want ARM installing backdoors on their chips and giving hostile foreign organizations like the MI6 access to vital American infrastructure, intelligence data etc. do you? It might be the time to consider switching to Elbrus or at least mandating that all devices used by US government agencies have to use Intel’s chips.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoI think the argument is that non-cooperation represents a much greater long term threat to everyone involved than cooperation, collaboration.
- rectang 2y agoIncreased collaboration between the Russian state and the American state is bad for the ordinary citizens of both — and for freedom-loving people in Ukraine, Europe, and everywhere else.
- somenameforme 2y agoThe US and Russia are the biggest nuclear powers in the world. Positive relations here are good for absolutely everybody. Positive relations do not mean one has to approve of the political system, ideology, or whatever else of the other side. See: Saudi Arabia which remained a key ally for many decades in spite of being wayyyyyy further off the spectrum (relative to the US) than Russia could ever be. Overtly adversarial relationships trend towards violence, sooner or later, and that's not a path we ever want to go down.
- throwaway290 2y agoWhy not judge on the merit. Unlike PRC's deepseek or tiktok which were shown and admitted to collect all sorts of data and specifically influence public opinion to favor a foreign interest this is literally just information, white hat infosec research
- shakna 2y agoYou cannot divorce the company from their other actions. They are engaged in cyber warfare with various nations. That means that all of their actions need to be weighed and judged. They put it on their website, which makes it company PR, regardless of how it might be seen. Good things have been done by terrible actors, since the dawn of time. It is not information alone.
- 2Gkashmiri 2y agocareful or you would have to divorce google because of their actions but the larger question is, will you?
- shakna 2y agoI don't believe Google has directly caused the leaking of classified information, or attacking vital infrastructure, as of yet. Kaspersky, yes [0]. TikTok, yes [1]. Google do, however, publish information on commercial spy networks [2]. However, it is likely that I would do so if they show themselves to be an enemy of my nation. If you've found Google attacking a government, I'm sure plenty of people would love to see the evidence. [0] https://securityaffairs.com/174586/intelligence/australia-bans-kaspersky-over-national-security-concerns.html https://securityaffairs.com/174586/intelligence/australia-ba... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/byte-dance-tik-tok-internal-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/byte-dance-tik... [2] https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/documents/Buying_Spying_-_Insights_into_Commercial_Surveillance_Vendors_-_TAG_report.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/doc...
- 2y ago
- wongarsu 2y agoAll cyber security companies should be considered state actors. Even if they currently aren't it's too easy for a state to coopt them. If you build an antivirus software today, and tomorrow you get a secret court order to ignore certain malware for "national security" what are you going to do? What if it's a request to include a small binary payload in return for a lucrative government contract, with implied threats of what happens if you leak the request? You can decide not to do it and just shut down, but then the only ones left on the market are the ones that complied. If you do cyber security for more than just compliance, evaluating the software providers against your threat model was always an important step. Whether that means avoiding American, Chinese or Russian software. In the threat model of a Western government agency, Russian software should have have been off limits since the 50s (even if Kaspersky tries to tell you they are not Russian at all). That still doesn't mean their work is any less interesting or praiseworthy. Just like how you know NASA landed on the moon because Roscomos didn't dispute it, Kaspersky can do work and offer perspectives that might be more difficult for similarly sized western cyber security companies.
- yaomtc 2y agoI'd heard of gag orders, but I hadn't heard of secret court orders like that. I searched and found this: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/secret-court-opinion-reveals-mystery-tech-firm https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/secret-court-opi... Do you know of other examples?
- flakeoil 2y agoMaybe don't put too much into the word "court order", but instead interpret it as an order from the government to force the company to use the tool for the governments/country's benefit. One could also assume that the owners and/or management of the company are in the same boat as the government/country so they do not mind using the tool for the country's benefit when needed.
- shakna 2y agoAustralia's Assistance and Access Orders (TAN, TCN, etc.) [0] basically allow the government to order mandatory backdoors into various software. They do have some oversight, but it isn't significant. They can order any employee, not just the company. The wording is also... Squirelly. You can't introduce a weakness, but the definition of weakness excludes the entire concept of backdoors. However, Technical Capability Notices can be ordered where: > reasonable, proportionate, practicable and technically feasible The employee/company can push back and argue one of those isn't met, but ultimately it is the office of the Governor General that decides. So far, it has basically only be used against journalists [1], as far as we know, which is nice and horrific. [0] https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/national-security/lawful-access-telecommunications/assistance-and-access-overview https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio... [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-15/abc-raids-australian-federal-police-press-freedom/11309810 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-15/abc-raids-australian-...
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoNot since today- russia is no longer to be threated as hostile and all cyber attacks planned on it have to yield.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- codedokode 2y agoIt is not very fair singling out Kaspersky and assuming that other AV companies are not a threat to foreign countries. Foreign software and hardware is always a threat. And US was caught spying even on their allies.
- shakna 2y agoThe US, while hardly benign, have not orchestrated multiples of "largest attack in history", for multiple previous years in a row. Russia and China, have. The threat scale here, is not an even playing field.
- close04 2y ago> The US, while hardly benign, have not orchestrated multiples of "largest attack in history" You must be using a very personal interpretation of what "largest attack in history" is. The US is literally the owner and operator of the largest surveillance and intelligence collecting apparatus in the history of mankind. I bundle in here all kinds of legal and illegal surveillance, interceptions, hacking, etc. directly state run, or leveraging other intelligence agencies, or leveraging the largest private data collectors in the world which are mostly US companies. It was already proven by the Snowden leaks, it's absolutely reasonable to assume this apparatus only grew stronger. If that's not a never ending "largest attack" on everyone in the world I don't know what is.
- 0x1ceb00da 2y agoRussia attacked ukraine but what did china do?
- belter 2y ago"Chinese hack of US telecoms compromised more firms than previously known" - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/chinese-hack-us-telecoms-compromised-more-firms-than-previously-known-wsj-says-2025-01-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/chinese-hack-... "Chinese hackers are deep inside America’s telecoms networks" - https://www.economist.com/china/2024/12/12/chinese-hackers-are-deep-inside-americas-telecoms-networks https://www.economist.com/china/2024/12/12/chinese-hackers-a...
- isaacremuant 2y ago[flagged]
- TiredOfLife 2y agoRussia is currently waging an actual war of invasian. They are constantly threatening multiple countries with invasion and nuking.
- DeathArrow 2y agoBy the same logic, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft should be considered state actors.
- AceJohnny2 2y agoWhy, yes.
- shakna 2y agoPlease feel free to point out where the CIA successfully issued directives to those companies to target foreign nationals. Baring in mind, that Snowden's revelations did in fact cause outcry, and national responses to US companies. And helped push through various data protections in Europe, including stipulating non-sharing of data with the US.
- torginus 2y agoHas this been proven? Or is this another 'they are in a foreign country so they could be compelled to spy on us?' - not that I have a particular desire to defend Russia at this moment in time.
- ivanmontillam 2y agoThis is a fair question. I also get nitpickity about it. Not because some organization or some person is Russian, then it must be under the control of Putin. Pavel Durov is Russian, and I don't have reasons to believe he syphons my data to the Kremlin (other than getting randomly detained in France).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 2y agoIronically, we are having similar discussions regarding US companies if the trend with the current administration is to continue. The big difference is that as of today, we are currently stuck with available alternatives, but it won't surprise me if many goverments start looking back into the computing diversity infrastructure that we had during cold war days.
- k_sze 2y agoI'm in Canada and I just get auto-redirected to the kaspersky.ca home page when I try to visit the link.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- shakna 2y agoThey link here [0] for more details, which might be less geo-intercepted. [0] https://securelist.com/gitvenom-campaign/115694/ https://securelist.com/gitvenom-campaign/115694/
- usr1106 2y agoYeah, was also thinking is Kaspersky pro-Putin or in exile? Might have read something at some point, but have forgotten.
- k_sze 2y agoYou're confusing Kaspersky with Kasparov, perhaps?
- userbinator 2y agoThe amount of developers I've met who will just download, compile, and run stuff from GitHub in the same way as if it was closed-source, i.e. paying no attention to the fact that the source is available for inspection, is surprisingly many.
- mgolawala 2y agoI think it is worse than that. I think being on GitHub (and seemingly open source) gives developers a false sense of security in that they assume the code is open and therefore community vetted and that the developer has nothing to hide. I suspect people who would know not to download and run a random binary off the internet would download, compile and run projects from GitHub.
- unclebucknasty 2y agoBut, truly, what is the solution? I mean, you can use static analysis or similar, but you generally can't check every line of code for every open source lib you pull in, let alone its dependencies. Seems that, once you decide to use open source, you are actually making a choice to trust to some extent.
- consumer451 2y ago> But, truly, what is the solution? Let's use GitHub as an example. We have forks, and stars. Maybe we could also have some kind of build endorsement? How one would verify that the endorser is worth your trust, I am not entirely sure. Maybe endorsers could eventually be rated by CVEs found in their endorsements, and that would build trust?
- achempion 2y agoCopilot for sure should be able to describe the code and spot basic malware
- 2y ago
- cookiengineer 2y agoThis isn't kaspersky's research? Around a̵ ̵w̵e̵e̵k̵ ̵a̵g̵o̵ ̵(̵?̵)̵ a couple days ago someone made a post on /̵r̵/̵c̵y̵b̵e̵r̵s̵e̵c̵u̵r̵i̵t̵y̵ /r/hacking where he made a scraper and analyzed all the malware he could find. The repo amount was in the ~1000s repos that he shared in a spreadsheet. Github as a domain is feasible as a malware dropper domain due to it being allow listed by Microsoft. The attackers seem to use bots to use the releases section of other repositories, the code is there, too, but incomplete. They were also targeting many popular games like Fortnite, Valorant, CS2 and others with their cheats that contained the malware. It was kind of interesting to see because they used a lot of screenshots in the README files that seemingly were enough to convince gamers to install the malware. The dropper/stealer samples that I took a look at were python obfuscated bundles targeting Win11 and lots of different browser cookie storages, password managers, and even replaced the MetaMask extension inside the browser profile with another one after stealing all the session cookies and passwords. As an exfil technique they used discord, and you could see lots of different ranks of the discord server, with the API tokens and paypal ids and other things that they automated their payments with. It was super interesting to see that they switched to using python there, because it's an odd choice from a redteam perspective. I still have the deobfuscated code somewhere, not sure if I can find the link to the original research article again. Couldn't find it with the shitty reddit search. edit: Man, this weekend been way too long. Here's the links to the original article from only a couple days ago: [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1izryuk/github_scam_investigation_thousands_of_mods_and/ https://old.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1izryuk/github_scam... [2] https://timsh.org/github-scam-investigation-thousands-of-mods-and-cracks-stealing-your-data/ https://timsh.org/github-scam-investigation-thousands-of-mod... [3] The google spreadsheet (archive link because traffic limit has been reached I guess): https://archive.is/ijiWP https://archive.is/ijiWP edit 2: The pubhtml file of the google spreadsheet I have also on my hard drive, but it's ~23MB. Maybe I can make a gist out of that later? The spreadsheet didn't show an export button or UI, that's why I used wget at the time.
- yorwba 2y agoWhat makes you sure the malware described here is the same as the one you read about before? After all, GitHub isn't limited to one malware campaign at a time. E.g. we also have https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203158 from 3 days ago, which seems to be a different thing at first glance.
- KronisLV 2y agoHonestly, whenever some malware like this is revealed, that just makes me wish for more sandboxing and alerting in OSes. For example, each app getting its own writable directory structure and access to anything else needing to be explicitly granted by the user. It would require work to make the UX not be horrible, but that's a solvable problem. The fact that we don't have that in mainstream OSes in $CURRENT_YEAR given the security situation of the software out there, is insane.
- amelius 2y agoAgree. And code libraries should be similarly isolated.
- _23sd 2y agoOptional app sandboxing that does what you're talking about already exists on every major OS, disregarding Linux distributions that don't have Flatpak. Seems to me it's less a UX problem and more cultural: a critical mass of developers take the easy way and users learn to ignore the alerts. Android has the same problem with the "all files access" permission. The one platform where this works, iOS, has a totalitarian ruler that requires all apps to be sandboxed and not request gratuitous permissions. To really get around the culture problem you would need an OS that lacks the concept of undeclared data sharing between different packages.
- ikekkdcjkfke 2y agoFile system and syscall filter driver that asks user when something is accessing something it did not create
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Aachen 2y agoI don't see any hint on how to recognise, or how not to recognise them. Did the projects have lots of stars? Fake issues and pull activity? What kind of software did they claim to be? Did they work, to avoid it being obvious after executing and the user reporting the repository to Github? How hard was it to spot the malware, underhand C contest level or obvious if you just open the right file (among hundreds, I guess) and see it do illegitimate things? All it says is that the projects were written in different common languages...
- rozab 2y agoYou need to click through to the actual investigation https://securelist.com/gitvenom-campaign/115694/ https://securelist.com/gitvenom-campaign/115694/
- hackburg 2y ago[dead]