Down the Rabbit Hole of Unicode Obfuscation
In the ever-vigilant effort to secure the open-source ecosystem, Veracode’s continuous monitoring systems recently flagged a pair of npm malware packages—solders and @mediawave/lib. The malicious behavior, however, is not at all obvious at first because of a layer of unusual Unicode obfuscation that caught our attention. Our investigation focused on the solders package, which leverages a common yet critical attack vector: a postinstall script in its package.json.