The maintainer of the Axios npm package has confirmed that the supply chain compromise was the result of a highly-targeted social engineering campaign orchestrated by North Korean threat actors tracked as UNC1069.
Maintainer Jason Saayman said the attackers tailored their social engineering efforts “specifically to me” by first approaching him under the guise of the founder of a legitimate, well-known company.
“They had cloned the company’s founders’ likeness as well as the company itself,” Saayman said in a post-mortem of the incident. “They then invited me to a real Slack workspace. This workspace was branded to the company’s CI and named in a plausible manner. The Slack [workspace] was thought out very well; they had channels where they were sharing LinkedIn posts.”
Subsequently, the threat actors are said to have scheduled a meeting with him on Microsoft Teams. Upon joining the fake call, he was presented with a fake error message that stated “something on my system was out of date.” As soon as the update was triggered, the attack led to the deployment of a remote access trojan.
The access afforded by the Trojan enabled the attackers to steal the npm account credentials necessary to publish two trojanized versions of the Axios npm package (1.14.1 and 0.30.4) containing an implant named WAVESHAPER.V2.
“Everything was extremely well coordinated, looked legit, and was done in a professional manner,” Saayman added.
The attack chain described by the project maintainer shares extensive overlaps with tradecraft associated with UNC1069 and BlueNoroff. Details of the campaign were extensively documented by Huntress and Kaspersky last year, with the latter tracking it under the moniker GhostCall.
“Historically, […] these specific guys have gone after crypto founders, VCs, public people,” security researcher Taylor Monahan said. “They social engineer them and take over their accounts and target the next round of people. This evolution to targeting [OSS maintainers] is a bit concerning in my opinion.”
As preventive steps, Saayman has outlined several changes, including resetting all devices and credentials, setting up immutable releases, adopting OIDC flow for publishing, and updating GitHub Actions to adopt best practices.
The findings demonstrate how open-source project maintainers are increasingly becoming the target of sophisticated attacks, effectively allowing threat actors to target downstream users at scale by publishing poisoned versions of highly popular packages.
With Axios attracting nearly 100 million weekly downloads and being used heavily across the JavaScript ecosystem, the blast radius of such a supply chain attack can be massive as it propagates swiftly through direct and transitive dependencies.
“A package as widely used as Axios being compromised shows how difficult it is to reason about exposure in a modern JavaScript environment,” Socket’s Ahmad Nassri said. “It is a property of how dependency resolution in the ecosystem works today.”
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