A sophisticated and ongoing supply-chain attack operating for the past year has been stealing sensitive login credentials from both malicious and benevolent security personnel by infecting them with Trojanized versions of open source software from GitHub and NPM, researchers said.

The campaign, first reported three weeks ago by security firm Checkmarx and again on Friday by Datadog Security Labs, uses multiple avenues to infect the devices of researchers in security and other technical fields. One is through packages that have been available on open source repositories for over a year. They install a professionally developed backdoor that takes pains to conceal its presence. The unknown threat actors behind the campaign have also employed spear phishing that targets thousands of researchers who publish papers on the arXiv platform.

Unusual longevity

The objectives of the threat actors are also multifaceted. One is the collection of SSH private keys, Amazon Web Services access keys, command histories, and other sensitive information from infected devices every 12 hours. When this post went live, dozens of machines remained infected, and an online account on Dropbox contained some 390,000 credentials for WordPress websites taken by the attackers, most likely by stealing them from fellow malicious threat actors. The malware used in the campaign also installs cryptomining software that was present on at least 68 machines as of last month.

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