Dozens of Red Hat packages backdoored through its official NPM channel
Anyone who has downloaded affected Red Hat packages should investigate immediately.
Official Red Hat NPM accounts have been compromised and used to push a malicious worm that spreads from machine to machine, where it pilfers sensitive credentials in hopes of stealing yet more confidential data, researchers said.
The supply-chain attack began Monday and remained active at the time this post went live, according to researchers at security firm Aikido. It’s the result of the threat actor responsible for the hack taking control of @redhat-cloud-services, a legitimate channel in the npm repository that’s reserved for official Red Hat packages. As such, the channel is widely trusted by developers who rely on Red Hat cloud services.
The vicious cycle of today’s supply-chain attacks
It’s unclear precisely how the threat actor took control of the namespace, but it almost certainly involved the compromise of credentials required to access it, possibly through a previous supply-chain attack. More than 30 packages seem to be affected.
This story was first published by Ars Technica. Read the original report