Do GitHub people care about malware reports?

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UCyborg
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Do GitHub people care about malware reports?

Post by UCyborg » 2026-04-25, 23:07

I recently stumbled upon and reported the repository on GitHub that distributes malware. It's been a week since and no response.

Even though their automated mail said they're experiencing higher volumes, I can't help but wonder what's going on or if I did something wrong.
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UCyborg
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Re: Do GitHub people care about malware reports?

Post by UCyborg » 2026-05-09, 10:10

It's been almost 3 weeks since the report to GitHub itself and still nothing.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/3f22e6637afd4b7c99477855465ab102aa29d24f5a8fcced7ed68148f483c545

Somehow, the only reason it ended up on VirusTotal, is me. :)

Arbitrary ZIP inserted into the source tree, the malicious author force-pushes the same commit multiple times a day to inflate his contribution count, a legitimate developer would totally do that. /s

Repo was published as new, bypassing fork function (valid way to go in some cases, but the ill-intent in this case), readme changed to direct user to the malicious payload, the ZIP itself contains Lua interpreter, obfuscated script and a CMD to invoke Lua interpreter to execute the script. The script silently generates additional executables and installs scheduled tasks to run them.

That report on VirusTotal is not complete, it doesn't answer the question what generated executables do.

And that POS appears on top on popular search engines while the legitimate repo is hidden from plain sight. 😠 Though I haven't figured out Gradle / Java to get it to run...
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Re: Do GitHub people care about malware reports?

Post by BenFenner » 2026-05-09, 11:26


Lucio Chiappetti
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Re: Do GitHub people care about malware reports?

Post by Lucio Chiappetti » 2026-05-09, 12:14

UCyborg wrote:
2026-04-25, 23:07
I recently stumbled upon and reported the repository on GitHub that distributes malware. It's been a week since and no response.
I do not know whether to expect a response ... yesterday I just made a spam report (suspected malware) but it was the first time.
A curious form of academic-targeted spam ... a mail to "undisclosed recipients" from a fake address at Salamanca university disguised as EduCloud announcing "some large files for download on our secure server" (!), with a link pointing to github.
After checking with other colleagues they had received it too ... I tried if there was an abuse report form on github.
Apparently the support area is only for subscribers ... as I had an account though never use it, I tried it ... and could not find an obvious abuse report form ... I used the closest thing, and that was scanned by some form of AI, which agreed that it was possible spam and finally disclosed the link to the abuse report area. After an audio captcha (the new fashion ?) the report was submitted ... but actually I did not expect a reply (but an action).
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. (G.B. Shaw)