Malicious code in praetorian-mind-rce-test-2026 (PyPI)

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Source: amazon-inspector (a7a16a607fd396ce7218fb45728cb3ca55f541326c83a063668a7a170b46acc1)

At pip install time, setup.py calls a phone_home() routine at module top-level before setup() runs. The routine collects extensive host and container reconnaissance — hostname, uid/gid, uname, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts, /proc/self/cgroup, mount output, ps aux, directory listings of /, /app, /home — and serializes the complete process environment via {k: v for k, v in sorted(os.environ.items())}. When ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_URI_V4 is present, it additionally fetches ECS container and task metadata (which exposes IAM task-role context useful for credential abuse). The aggregated JSON payload is POSTed via urllib.request.urlopen to the hardcoded non-publisher endpoint https://5h6gijnewx787zu6.ixx.sh. The full-environment dump routinely contains CI, cloud, and registry credentials (AWS_*, tokens, secrets), and the ECS metadata read enables IAM role abuse against the installer's cloud account.

Source: kam193 (f9a677a1b1a8762a3f01e91a8da196298bf146b255dc7f9d834842916882372b)

During installation, package exfiltrates environment variables, tokens from cloud environments and fingerprints the environment. It identifies itself as a security testing engagement.

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

Campaign: 2026-09-praetorian-mind-rce-test-2026

Reasons (based on the campaign):

• exfiltration-env-variables

• The package contains code to exfiltrate basic data from the system, like IP or username. It has a limited risk.

• exfiltration-cloud-tokens

Source: ossf-package-analysis (48d3d63e8f3773e745ea3c4961c8d598e880db130cf063cc738a381080c2b782)

The OpenSSF Package Analysis project identified 'praetorian-mind-rce-test-2026' @ 0.0.2 (pypi) as malicious.

It is considered malicious because:

• The package executes one or more commands associated with malicious behavior.