Malicious code in unreal-mladapter (PyPI)

Overview

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Source: amazon-inspector (126bf3493d123333b47fba2ed68e30c085c8266dfb4d16923a81e9ee094f4780)

The package name unreal-mladapter mimics Epic Games' internal UnrealMLAdapter plugin and is published at version 99999.0.0 — the canonical high-version bump used in dependency-confusion attacks to override private/internal resolution. On any import unreal_mladapter, the top-level init.py spawns a background thread that POSTs a JSON payload containing the installer's hostname, USER/USERNAME environment variable, and current working directory to http://109.123.247.172/pypi over plaintext HTTP. Errors are swallowed. Package metadata is placeholder (author 'Security Research', description 'Internal package'). The import-time exfiltration of host identifiers to a hardcoded non-publisher bare-IP endpoint, combined with the 99999.0.0 dependency-confusion version and internal-namespace impersonation, is an unambiguous supply-chain attack shape.

Source: kam193 (b8b4f17043a9c57ea2087c59c771151186c117ab64cbf5c45df85df62469aa89)

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.

Affected packages

• unreal-mladapter

Remediation

Refer to the advisory for the patched release.