Malicious Package Affecting botbait package, versions *


Severity

Recommended
0.0
high
0
10

CVSS assessment made by Snyk's Security Team. Learn more

Threat Intelligence

Exploit Maturity
Mature
EPSS
0.09% (38th percentile)

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  • Snyk IDnpm:botbait:20170917
  • published17 Sept 2017
  • disclosed8 Aug 2017
  • creditJordan Wright

Introduced: 8 Aug 2017

Malicious CVE-2017-16126  (opens in a new tab)
CWE-506  (opens in a new tab)

How to fix?

Avoid usage of this package altogether.

Overview

botbait is a malicious package that was used to collect download metrics beyond what npm provides, and sent them to google analytics or piwik. This can cause a privacy concern amongst users.

This is especially dangerous in production runtime environments, where environment variables tend to consist of keys, passwords, tokens and other secrets.

Example:

{
  "name": "npm_scripts_test_metrics",
  "scripts": {
    "preinstall": "curl 'http://google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=event&tid=....'",
    "postinstall": "curl 'http://google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=event&tid=....'"
  }
},
{
  "name": "subtitles-lib",
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "bash -c 'curl \"http://*****.piwikpro.com/piwik.php?idsite=3&rec=1&action_name=$HOSTNAME\"'"
  }
}

The list of packages and their scripts are:

npm_scripts_test_metrics
subtitles-lib
ikst
botbait
mktmpio
anarchy

CVSS Scores

version 3.1