OPEN source software with more than 1 million monthly downloads was compromised after a threat actor exploited a vulnerability in the developers’ account workflow that gave access to its signing keys and other sensitive information. On Friday, unknown attackers exploited the vulnerability to push a new version of element-data, a command-line interface that helps users monitor performance and anomalies in machine-learning systems.
When run, the malicious package scoured systems for sensitive data, including user profiles, warehouse credentials, cloud provider keys, API tokens, and SSH keys, developers said. The malicious version was tagged as 0.23.3 and was published to the developers’ Python Package Index and Docker image accounts, and it was removed about 12 hours later, on Saturday. Element developers said they also rotated all credentials that the malicious code had access to.
The guidance from the team urged users who installed version 0.23.3 to act quickly, including uninstalling and pinning the safe version, and rotating any credentials exposed by the environment where 0.23.3 ran.