The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering

The Axios team have published a full postmortem on the supply chain attack which resulted in a malware dependency going out in a release the other day, and it involved a sophisticated social engineering campaign targeting one of their maintainers directly. Here’s Jason Saayman’a description of how that worked:

so the attack vector mimics what google has documented here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/unc1069-targets-cryptocurrency-ai-social-engineering

they tailored this process specifically to me by doing the following:

• they reached out masquerading as the founder of a company they had cloned the companys founders likeness as well as the company itself.
• they then invited me to a real slack workspace. this workspace was branded to the companies ci and named in a plausible manner. the slack was thought out very well, they had channels where they were sharing linked-in posts, the linked in posts i presume just went to the real companys account but it was super convincing etc. they even had what i presume were fake profiles of the team of the company but also number of other oss maintainers.
• they scheduled a meeting with me to connect. the meeting was on ms teams. the meeting had what seemed to be a group of people that were involved.
• the meeting said something on my system was out of date. i installed the missing item as i presumed it was something to do with teams, and this was the RAT.
• everything was extremely well co-ordinated looked legit and was done in a professional manner.

A RAT is a Remote Access Trojan – this was the software which stole the developer’s credentials which could then be used to publish the malicious package.

That’s a very effective scam. I join a lot of meetings where I find myself needing to install Webex or Microsoft Teams or similar at the last moment and the time constraint means I always click “yes” to things as quickly as possible to make sure I don’t join late.

Every maintainer of open source software used by enough people to be worth taking in this way needs to be familiar with this attack strategy.

Tags: open-source, packaging, security, social-engineering, supply-chain