I’m one of the co-founders @ Phylum. We have a history of reporting these attacks/malware to the appropriate organizations. We work closely with PyPI, NPM, Github, and others - and have reported thousands of malicious packages in the last few years. If you were following GIthub’s recent security advisory, you can see a shout-out for some of our previous work. There are also public thanks from the Crates.io team for our efforts over on HN.
I say all this to assure you we didn’t write or release this malware. It just wouldn’t make sense, especially when these open-source ecosystems contain so much malware for us to hunt and report on already. Though I get the logic, we have seen other security companies do this - and called them out for it.
Our platform is free for developers and small teams (heck, I’ll give anyone who asks for it a free pro account if you really need it). We’ve open-sourced our CLI and sandbox that limits access to network/disk/env during package installation. We’re genuinely - really - trying to help make these ecosystems safer.
we’re working on a third party solution for this. Should have some updates that sandbox cargo builds shortly.
https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage
It’s a cross-platform sandbox that works on Linux via Landlock and macOS via Seatbelt. We’ve rolled this into our CLI (https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli) so you can do thinks like:
For example for npm, which currently uses the sandbox:
We’re adding this to cargo to similarly sandbox crate installations. Would love feedback and thoughts on our sandbox!