Malicious code in kafka-roller (PyPI)

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Source: amazon-inspector (4490e03c9b281c985d7cc5c877d359f8f3789a2ec44421602137c461ac4a2a52)

The package is published to PyPI under the name kafka-roller with metadata impersonating Tesla's teslamotors/kafka-helmsman project (homepage points at github.com/teslamotors/kafka-helmsman while the publisher is an unaffiliated account), and version 99.0.4 is pinned implausibly high — the dependency-confusion squat shape. setup.py starts a module-level daemon thread during pip's metadata/wheel build that collects hostname, current working directory, platform information, a timestamp and a UUID, and transmits them via HTTPS POST to https://webhook.site/bf5cb178-e0cf-43b6-8b1e-fb5d2f6ea9c9 and via HTTPS GET plus DNS lookups to a subdomain of oast.site (an interactsh out-of-band collector). The DNS channel is driven by subprocess invocations of nslookup/getent/dig against an attacker-chosen hostname, providing a secondary exfiltration path that bypasses HTTP egress filtering. The beacon fires on any pip processing of the sdist without installer consent, and leaks internal host and build-environment identifiers for any build system that misresolves the kafka-roller name to this PyPI package. A self-description as 'dependency-confusion security research' does not change the behavior: install-time out-of-band callbacks carrying host identifiers to attacker-controlled collectors are exfiltration regardless of framing.

Source: kam193 (ddfe2b638b0889fe0ad773e6d97df2a3649cd830ca5e2ae851a2227ede687b1a)

Installing the package or importing the module exfiltrates basic information about the host, and the package has no other purpose.

Category: PROBABLY_PENTEST - Packages looking like typical pentest packages, but also anything that looks like testing, exploring pre-prepared kits, research & co, with clearly low-harm possibilities.

Campaign: GENERIC-standard-pypi-install-pentest

Reasons (based on the campaign):

• The package contains code to exfiltrate basic data from the system, like IP or username. It has a limited risk.

• The package overrides the install command in setup.py to execute malicious code during installation.

Source: ossf-package-analysis (4b68fa52500e16cab90e8038ae96e2ba1be6c448a8caa40ab3e46dc6d3c26436)

The OpenSSF Package Analysis project identified 'kafka-roller' @ 99.0.0 (pypi) as malicious.

It is considered malicious because:

• The package communicates with a domain associated with malicious activity.