The infamous TeamPCP hacking group that besieged the open source software ecosystem several times over the past half year has released the source code of its Shai-Hulud worm, opening the door to copycat attacks.
The code was shared via GitHub repositories under several users and was accompanied by detailed instructions on how to use it. While GitHub removed the repos, multiple forks also appeared, Datadog says.
The repositories also contained the “Shai–Hulud: Open Sourcing The Carnage” message from the hacking group itself, which states the intended purpose of the release, namely to fuel more supply chain attacks.
In fact, security researchers stumbled upon a separate announcement from TeamPCP and BreachForums encouraging cybercriminals to participate in a “supply chain challenge” in exchange for monetary rewards.
Miscreants were instructed to use the Shai-Hulud worm in their attacks, provide proof of intrusion, and cause as much downstream impact as possible to win the challenge.
“These two events together will bring about a period of innovation for Shai Hulud, likely spawning several variants of the malware,” said Black Duck principal cybersecurity engineer Ben Ronallo.
“TeamPCP is turning the knob up to 11 on their activities by releasing this to anyone who wants to use it,” Ronallo said.
According to Ox Security, threat actors have already started to modify the source code and use it in fresh attacks. The fast escalation was possible because the repositories included complete details on how the malware could be deployed.
Datadog’s analysis of the source code revealed a modular framework containing loaders, secrets-harvesting modules, an information collector, a dispatcher, exfiltrators, and mutators.
It also revealed artifacts seen in previous Shai-Hulud attacks, including the targeting of numerous developer and cloud credentials, API keys, tokens, and other types of secrets; the encryption of staged data, and the exfiltration to GitHub repositories and a predefined command-and-control (C&C) server.
The source code also allowed the researchers to take a closer look at the malware’s persistence mechanism and dead-man switch, as well as at its GitHub repository and NPM package poisoning mechanisms.
Furthermore, the source code revealed that, by design, compiled artifact hashes from open source reporting can not be reproduced, as a new random passphrase generated for each build is used to seed string encoding.
“Two builds from identical sources produce different binaries. This is an effective anti-signature measure: defenders cannot generate YARA rules from one compiled sample and expect them to match the next deployment,” Datadog warns.
By releasing the worm’s source code, TeamPCP lowered the barrier for threat actors to mount sophisticated supply chain attacks, while ensuring that its own actions could be hidden behind potential copycats’ campaigns.
“Organizations should start preparing for a sustained and significant spike in supply chain compromise activity resulting from both the open sourcing and the BreachForums contest,” Ronallo warned.
As Pathlock senior product manager Jonathan Stross pointed out, organizations should also assume that supply chain attacks fueled by Shai-Hulud will continue to mutate.
“Teams should isolate and rebuild affected developer and CI systems, rotate exposed credentials, restrict OIDC trusted publishing to tightly scoped workflows and protected branches, pin and review GitHub Actions, monitor package install behavior, and treat build pipelines as production-grade attack surfaces,” Stross said.
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