Malicious code in crypto-trader-py (PyPI)

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Source: amazon-inspector (33e855a3ce62e35b613e702e710b81900769c241707c80f6a61462df0927529c)

The package presents itself as a crypto trading and backtesting toolkit, but ships no library code matching that description — SOURCES.txt lists only LICENSE, README, setup.py, and egg-info metadata, and top_level.txt is empty. setup.py unconditionally invokes _wus_boot() before setup() during pip install, which spawns a sibling script _cryptotr_b2ca69.py via subprocess.Popen using pythonw.exe with Windows creationflags 0x08000000 (CREATE_NO_WINDOW) to hide the console window, guarded by a tempdir lockfile (13f8811c38.lk) to avoid re-entry. Stealth markers (hidden-window flag, pythonw preference, silent try/except wrapping, obfuscated identifiers) and the absence of any advertised library content match a dropper cover-story pattern rather than a legitimate build step, and the child process runs on every install with no user interaction.

Source: kam193 (734dc70863cedc4f248265b79254d8bc4ac9dbbc40337ad7a5bbd45d9314500b)

During installation, the package attempts to silently execute code. In analyzed versions, the payload file was missing.

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

Campaign: 2026-09-snap-queue

Reasons (based on the campaign):

• The package overrides the install command in setup.py to execute malicious code during installation.