I’m one of the co-founders @ Phylum. We have a history of reporting these attacks/malware to the appropriate organizations. We work closely with PyPI, NPM, Github, and others - and have reported thousands of malicious packages in the last few years. If you were following GIthub’s recent security advisory, you can see a shout-out for some of our previous work. There are also public thanks from the Crates.io team for our efforts over on HN.

I say all this to assure you we didn’t write or release this malware. It just wouldn’t make sense, especially when these open-source ecosystems contain so much malware for us to hunt and report on already. Though I get the logic, we have seen other security companies do this - and called them out for it.

Our platform is free for developers and small teams (heck, I’ll give anyone who asks for it a free pro account if you really need it). We’ve open-sourced our CLI and sandbox that limits access to network/disk/env during package installation. We’re genuinely - really - trying to help make these ecosystems safer.

They’re often supported by external resources, like China. There isn’t really a community inside of North Korea to draw from like you’d expect in some more established countries.

In this case the attackers are targeting technologists and convincing them to collaborate on a git repository somewhere. That git repo includes dependencies that are hosted on npm, and require a specific order of installation to trigger the malicious behavior.

When the unwitting dev installs thaw deps for the git reo, they receive the malicious payload as well.

Slackware was my first Linux distro