acloud-clients

GHSA-h43c-42rj-4vc4

Malicious code in acloud-clients (PyPI)

Details

**Severity:** Critical

**Affected versions:** `= 1.0.0`

## Source: kam193 (89813876cca364b0dffda624005d527aa3c9f54ea7ce20af8186faf8f374ba6f)
This campaign is built from two parts:
1) packages named like time-check-server, snapshot-photo contain an innocent-looking code that sends "date" to a remote server,
2) packages named like alicloud-client are clones of legit aliyun-python-sdk-core package, with a small change in the client.py code, where it imports the time-check-server and calls it, but instead of a date, the credentials to the cloud are exfiltrated. There are also variations with AWS clients

Apparently, the campaign started at least 2 years ago with the snapshot-photo package containing the same functionality as the newer time-check-server (see https://github.com/pypi-data/pypi-mirror-238/blob/code/packages/snapshot-photo/snapshot_photo-0.0.3-py3-none-any.whl/snapshot_photo/date_format.py).


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Category: MALICIOUS - The campaign has clearly malicious intent, like infostealers.


Campaign: 2025-02-alicloud-client


Reasons (based on the campaign):


 - clones-real-package


 - action-hidden-in-lib-usage


 - The malicious code is intentionally included in a dependency of the package


 - exfiltration-cloud-tokens

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Credit: [OpenSSF](https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages) ([source](https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages/blob/752e8a991f186423e3415980200bebfec22d1070/osv/malicious/pypi/acloud-clients/MAL-2025-191673.json))

**References:**
- https://bad-packages.kam193.eu/pypi/package/acloud-clients
- https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages/blob/752e8a991f186423e3415980200bebfec22d1070/osv/malicious/pypi/acloud-clients/MAL-2025-191673.json
- https://github.com/pypi-data/pypi-mirror-238/blob/code/packages/snapshot-photo/snapshot_photo-0.0.3-py3-none-any.whl/snapshot_photo/date_format.py
- https://thehackernews.com/2025/03/malicious-pypi-packages-stole-cloud.html
- https://x.com/ReversingLabs/status/1900198602242204003
- https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages/blob/49d0cfba3689ed9b195d101d3a2a964c6a77f767/osv/malicious/pypi/acloud-clients/MAL-2025-191673.json
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-h43c-42rj-4vc4

Compromised versions (1)

= 1.0.0

Any computer that installed or ran a compromised version should be considered fully compromised. Rotate every secret on that machine from a clean environment.