Why does mathmain need an encrypted loader?

j2kun

Why in the world would that specific 3x3 matrix be a trigger for an attack? Are they trying to find someone doing some particular kind of numerical analysis?

fshafique

Does the FBI or any other law-enforcement office follow up on these backdoors? Is this considered a crime, or even conspiracy to commit a crime, or is it only the act of using the backdoor that's a crime? I can also see that it's still up in NPM without any warning of any kind: - https://www.npmjs.com/package/mathmain But the Github repo for the package and the author are down: - https://github.com/allendev12 - https://github.com/allendev12/mathmain

nextzck

Fascinating how intricate the target selection is on this

altairprime

> We found a remote access implant hidden inside [email protected] , an npm package that copies the popular mathjs library. The NPM package not named in the clickbait-y post title is “mathmain@1.0.0”, for those who run into this particular site obstacle; the later packages also named are “mathsbase” and “math-universe”. (EDIT: I see the submission title has been updated, so that’s my complaint addressed, thanks mods!) Safedep, if you’re reading this, perhaps you should reconsider having that site feature applied to your post — or if it’s something you enabled in, say, Cloudflare, perhaps file a support ticket noting that their email protection is hiding package version strings.

hiddenvulkcan

I actually came across someone that cracked it (or use Claude/China to crack it) Turns out the second stage is completely broken, which is even more odd.. https://research.veryserious.systems/lusolve-and-you-shall-r...

TZubiri

My strategy of not using dependencies at all seems to be getting stronger everyday. Also no LLM generated skipping this hypetrain completely. Just hand written code I can personally vouch for. Code in exchange for cash, this is professional business, Boss. Btw, I'm available for hire, preferably by Pre Market Fit or pre-MVP startups, email in profile.

zzril

Had I found sthg like this, I'd be proud to tell everyone and certainly enjoy doing the writeup. But this smells like it was ai-written...

WorldMaker

A lot of this seems to be a reminder that the CommonJS module format should just be left to die already. Not that you can't pull similar tricks with `await import()` in ESM, but you can't easily grep an entire dependency for dynamic `require()` half as easily as you can can `grep import\s*\(` for dynamic import and analysis tools for static `import` keyword are easy to use/build rather than no such thing for CommonJS. Someone thought I was joking when I said I always check JSR before NPM now, because I trust ESM so much more than CommonJS.

fn-mote

You need to read quite a ways before discovering that JFrog did the work of cracking the password, which enabled the rest of the analysis. https://research.jfrog.com/post/equation-of-compromise/

firesteelrain

What is the fix for npm at this point? It has a lot of issues with the registry