Malicious Go Modules Deliver Disk-Wiping Linux Malware in Advanced Supply Chain Attack
Malicious Go Modules Deliver Disk-Wiping Linux Malware in Advanced Supply Chain Attack
Aaah finally, malware for Linux, truly the year of the Linux Desktop!
We made it! I never thought I'd live to see this day!
The Go programming language allows developers to fetch modules directly from version control platforms like GitHub.
This is absolutely not just specific to Go.
That's a pretty unique feature to Go I think. Maybe clang has something similar I guess?
CMake, which is kind of the universal standard build system for C++ now, has "fetch content" since v3.11. Put the URL of a repository (which can be remote, but also local, which is handy) and optionally the branch / commit ID that you'd like, and it will pull it into your build directory automatically. So yeah, you can pull anything nefarious that you'd like. I don't think most people would question pulling and building a library from Github as part of the build, especially if it had a sensible name for the task at hand.
This is why we can't have nice things
The one, fool-proof solution to supply chain attacks? Write all your own dependencies.
I'm already writing my own dependency to check if a number is even:
if (number == 0) return true if (number == 1) return false if (number == 2) return true if (number == 3) return false
I'm almost there!
That seems to be the Go way. Why put it in a library when everyone can just re-implement it themselves (and test and document it too, right? Right?).
E.g. There isn't even a standard set object, everyone just implements it as a map pointing to empty structs, and you get familiar with that and just accept it and learn to understand what it means when someone added an empty struct to a map. And then people try to paint this as a virtue of the language.
E.g. There isn't even a standard set object, everyone just implements it as a map pointing to empty structs, and you get familiar with that and just accept it and learn to understand what it means when someone added an empty struct to a map.
Goooood fucking gravy.
I hate to be such an opinionated programmer, but everything I've read about Go only reinforces my negative opinion, especially since I read this now-famous article.
Any intel on affected, high-profile software?
I found the original blog post more educational.
Looks like these may be typosquats, or at least "namespace obfuscation", imitating more popular packages. So hopefully not too widespread. I think it's easy to just search for a package name and copy/paste the first .git files, but it's important to look at forks/stars/issue numbers too. Maybe I'm just paranoid but I always creep on the owners of git repos a little before I include their stuff, but I can't say I do that for their includes and those includes etc. Like if this was included in hugo or something huge I would just be fucked.
Taking garbage collection to a whole new level !
If anyone is curious, I checked the yay aur helper go dependencies here and it had none of the malicious packages mentioned on this post
Halloween documents pt 2
