If this package is installed
Remove it, treat the machine (or CI runner) as compromised, and rotate every secret, token and key it could access — from a different, clean machine.
Details
Source: kam193 (23487ce28601ae00fc60455a6e324818c68a8a00b3a3d17f7356853ca7eedee5)
This campaign is built from two parts:
1) packages named like time-check-server, snapshot-photo contain an innocent-looking code that sends "date" to a remote server,
2) packages named like alicloud-client are clones of legit aliyun-python-sdk-core package, with a small change in the client.py code, where it imports the time-check-server and calls it, but instead of a date, the credentials to the cloud are exfiltrated. There are also variations with AWS clients
Apparently, the campaign started at least 2 years ago with the snapshot-photo package containing the same functionality as the newer time-check-server (see https://github.com/pypi-data/pypi-mirror-238/blob/code/packages/snapshot-photo/snapshot_photo-0.0.3-py3-none-any.whl/snapshot_photo/date_format.py).
---
Category: MALICIOUS - The campaign has clearly malicious intent, like infostealers.
Campaign: 2025-02-alicloud-client
Reasons (based on the campaign):
- clones-real-package
- action-hidden-in-lib-usage
- The malicious code is intentionally included in a dependency of the package
- exfiltration-cloud-tokens
Indicators of compromise
Shown defanged and not clickable. Search any indicator to find other packages using it.
Domains
- checktimeserver[.]org other packages →
- aliyun-sdk-requests[.]xyz other packages →
URLs
- hxxps://api[.]checktimeserver[.]org/ other packages →
- hxxps://api[.]aliyun-sdk-requests[.]xyz/ other packages →