GitHub comments abused to push malware via Microsoft repo URLs
A GitHub flaw, or possibly a design decision, is being abused by threat actors to distribute malware using URLs associated with a Microsoft repository, making the files appear trustworthy.
While most of the malware activity has been based around the Microsoft GitHub URLs, this "flaw" could be abused with any public repository on GitHub, allowing threat actors to create very convincing lures.
Yesterday, McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the "C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS," known as vcpkg.
The URLs for the malware installers, shown below, clearly indicate that they belong to the Microsoft repo, but we could not find any reference to the files in the project's source code.
Finding it strange that a Microsoft repo would be distributing malware since February, BleepingComputer looked into it and found that the files are not part of vcpkg but were uploaded as part of a comment left on a commit or issue in the project.
