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1369 points universesquid | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.731s | source
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DDerTyp ◴[] No.45170133[source]
One of the most insidious parts of this malware's payload, which isn't getting enough attention, is how it chooses the replacement wallet address. It doesn't just pick one at random from its list.

It actually calculates the Levenshtein distance between the legitimate address and every address in its own list. It then selects the attacker's address that is visually most similar to the original one.

This is a brilliant piece of social engineering baked right into the code. It's designed to specifically defeat the common security habit of only checking the first and last few characters of an address before confirming a transaction.

We did a full deobfuscation of the payload and analyzed this specific function. Wrote up the details here for anyone interested: https://jdstaerk.substack.com/p/we-just-found-malicious-code...

Stay safe!

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josefbud ◴[] No.45172015[source]
I'm a little confused on one of the excerpts from your article.

> Our package-lock.json specified the stable version 1.3.2 or newer, so it installed the latest version 1.3.3

As far as I've always understood, the lockfile always specifies one single, locked version for each dependency, and even provides the URL to the tarball of that version. You can define "x version or newer" in the package.json file, but if it updates to a new patch version it's updating the lockfile with it. The npm docs suggest this is the case as well: https://arc.net/l/quote/cdigautx

And with that, packages usually shouldn't be getting updated in your CI pipeline.

Am I mistaken on how npm(/yarn/pnpm) lockfiles work?

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1. DDerTyp ◴[] No.45172215[source]
You’re right and the excerpt you quoted was poorly worded and confusing. A lockfile is designed to do exactly what you said.

The package.json locked the file to ^1.3.2. If a newer version exists online that still satisfies the range in package.json (like 1.3.3 for ^1.3.2), npm install will often fetch that newer version and update your package-lock.json file automatically.

That’s how I understand it / that’s my current knowledge. Maybe there is someone here who can confirm/deny that. That would be great!

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2. typpilol ◴[] No.45176504[source]
You're correct