June’s Sophisticated npm Attack Attributed to North Korea
Contents
June’s Sophisticated npm Attack Attributed to North Korea
In June 2023, Phylum was the first to unearth a series of suspicious npm publications belonging to what appeared to be a highly targeted attack. The identified packages, published in pairs, required installation in a specific sequence, subsequently retrieving a token that facilitated the download of a final malicious payload from a remote server. A recent security alert from GitHub publicly attributes this cyber-attack—which they were investigating independently—to threat actors with strong ties to North Korean objectives. In this article, we delve deeper into the context of this attack, while also unveiling novel information uncovered by Phylum since our initial publication.
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The GitHub Security Alert
On July 18, 2023 GitHub posted a security alert on their blog, sharing further insights into this attack, which they had been collaboratively investigating with npm, their subsidiary. They described it as a "low-volume social engineering campaign that targets the …
In June 2023, Phylum was the first to unearth a series of suspicious npm publications belonging to what appeared to be a highly targeted attack. The identified packages, published in pairs, required installation in a specific sequence, subsequently retrieving a token that facilitated the download of a final malicious payload from a remote server. A recent security alert from GitHub publicly attributes this cyber-attack—which they were investigating independently—to threat actors with strong ties to North Korean objectives. In this article, we delve deeper into the context of this attack, while also unveiling novel information uncovered by Phylum since our initial publication.
--cta--
The GitHub Security Alert
On July 18, 2023 GitHub posted a security alert on their blog, sharing further insights into this attack, which they had been collaboratively investigating with npm, their subsidiary. They described it as a "low-volume social engineering campaign that targets the …