A supply-chain assault targets Linux servers with disk-wiping malware hidden in Golang modules revealed on GitHub.
The marketing campaign was detected final month and relied on three malicious Go modules that included “extremely obfuscated code” for retrieving distant payloads and executing them.
Full disk destruction
The assault seems designed particularly for Linux-based servers and developer environments, because the damaging payload – a Bash script named executed.sh, runs a ‘dd’ command for the file-wiping exercise.
Moreover, the payload verifies that it runs in a Linux surroundings (runtime.GOOS == “linux”) earlier than attempting to execute.
An evaluation from supply-chain safety firm Socket reveals that the command overwrites with zeroes each byte of knowledge, resulting in irreversible information loss and system failure.
The goal is the first storage quantity, /dev/sda, that holds essential system information, consumer recordsdata, databases, and configurations.
“By populating all the disk with zeros, the script utterly destroys the file system construction, working system, and all consumer information, rendering the system unbootable and unrecoverable” – Socket
The researchers found the assault in April and recognized three Go modules on GitHub, which have since been faraway from the platform:
- github[.]com/truthfulpharm/prototransform
- github[.]com/blankloggia/go-mcp
- github[.]com/steelpoor/tlsproxy
All three modules contained obfuscated code that decodes into instructions that use ‘wget’ to obtain the malicious data-wiping script (/bin/bash or /bin/sh).
In response to Socket researchers, the payloads are executed instantly after obtain, “leaving nearly no time for response or restoration.”
The malicious Go modules seem to have impersonated official initiatives for changing message information to varied codecs (Prototransform), a Go implementation of the Mannequin Context Protocol (go-mcp), and a TLS proxy device that gives encryption for TCP and HTTP servers (tlsproxy).
Socket researchers warn that even minimal publicity to the analyzed damaging modules can considerably affect equivalent to full information loss.
Due to the decentralized nature of the Go ecosystem that lacks correct checks, packages from completely different builders can have the identical or related names.
Attackers can leverage this to create module namespaces that seem official and await builders to combine the malicious code into their initiatives.
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