Open source package with 1 million monthly downloads compromised to steal credentials

Open source software with more than 1 million monthly downloads was compromised after a threat actor exploited a vulnerability in the developers' account workflow that gave access to its signing keys and other sensitive information. On Friday, unknown attackers exploited the vulnerability to push a new version of element-data, a command-line interface that helps users monitor performance and anomalies in machine-learning systems. When run, the malicious package scoured systems for sensitive data, including user profiles, warehouse credentials, cloud provider keys, API tokens, and SSH keys. The malicious version was tagged as 0.23.3 and was published to the developers' Python Package Index and Docker image accounts. It was removed about 12 hours later, on Saturday. The threat actor gained access by exploiting a vulnerability in a GitHub action the developers created. By posting malicious code to a pull request, the attackers were able to run a bash script inside the developer's account that retrieved sensitive data. With the account tokens and signing keys, the attacker published a malicious element-data package that was nearly indistinguishable from a legitimate one. The developers learned of the compromise from a third-party issue report. Within three hours, the package was removed. The developers also rotated all credentials that the malicious code had access to, fixed the vulnerability, and audited all other GitHub actions to ensure none contain the same flaw. Elementary Cloud, the Elementary dbt package, and all other CLI versions were not affected.