Malware vector: become an admin on dormant, widely-used open source projects

Cory Doctorow 12:51 pm Mon Nov 26, 2018

Many open source projects attain a level of "maturity" where no one really needs any new features and there aren't a lot of new bugs being found, and the contributors to these projects dwindle, often to a single maintainer who is generally grateful for developers who take an interest in these older projects and offer to share the choresome, intermittent work of keeping the projects alive.

Ironically, these are often projects with millions of users, who trust them specifically because of their stolid, unexciting maturity.

This presents a scary social-engineering vector for malware: A malicious person volunteers to help maintain the project, makes some small, positive contributions, gets commit access to the project, and releases a malicious patch, infecting millions of users and apps.

This is apparently what happened to event-stream, a widely used tool that was compromised by a crypto-currency stealing attacker who gained commit access, poisoned an update, and then locked the project's owner out.

I don't know what to say. #116 [Dominic Tarr/Github]

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