Kaspersky Global Research & Analysis Team (GReAT) has discovered hundreds of open source repositories with multistaged malware targeting gamers and cryptoinvestors within a new campaign dubbed GitVenom by Kaspersky. The infected projects include an automation instrument for interacting with Instagram accounts, a Telegram bot that enables the remote management of Bitcoin wallets and a crack tool to play the Valorant game. All of this alleged project functionality was fake, and cybercriminals behind the campaign stole personal and banking data and hijacked crypto-wallet addresses from the clipboard. As a result of the malicious activity cybercriminals were able to steal 5 Bitcoins (around $485,000 at the time of investigation).
For several years, these repositories have been stored on GitHub, a platform that allows developers to manage and share their code. The attackers did their best to make the repositories on GitHub appear legitimate to potential targets by using attractive project descriptions—most likely AI-generated. When the code from these repositories was launched, the victim’s device would become infected with malware and could be remotely controlled by the attackers.
While the projects were written in multiple programming languages—Python, JavaScript, C, C++ and C#—the malicious payloads stored inside the infected projects had the same goal: to download other malicious components from an attacker-controlled GitHub repository and execute them. These components include a stealer that collects passwords, bank account information, saved credentials, cryptocurrency wallet data and browsing history, packs it into a .7z archive and uploads it to attackers via Telegram.
Other downloaded malicious components include remote administration tools that can be used to remotely monitor and control a victim’s computer through a secure encrypted connection and a clipboard hijacker, which searches the clipboard contents for cryptocurrency wallet addresses and replaces them with attacker-controlled ones. Notably, the attacker-controlled Bitcoin wallet received a sum of about 5 BTC (approximately $485,000 at the time of research) in November 2024.
“As code sharing platforms like GitHub are used by millions of developers worldwide, threat actors will certainly continue using fake software as an infection lure in the future. For that reason, it is crucial to handle processing of third-party code very carefully. Before attempting to run such code or integrate it into an existing project, it is paramount to thoroughly check what actions are performed by it. This way, it will be very easy to spot fake projects and prevent malicious code placed in them from being used to compromise the development environment,” concludes Georgy Kucherin, Security Researcher at Kaspersky GReAT.
