CRITICAL RubyGems Malware

Malicious code in seed-phrase-validator (RubyGems)

MAL-2026-17794

Published · Modified

Dependency scanning

Check whether seed-phrase-validator is in your codebase

Corgea flags malicious and compromised dependencies with reachability analysis, so you fix the packages that actually run in your application instead of working through the whole lockfile.

Description


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Source: amazon-inspector (fb8d12a066c24d672bf16efe57267c46c727592ee21beb0e2accb3bb6e4bfb3a)

The gem declares a native extension but ships no C/C++/Rust source. extconf.rb exists solely to execute at gem install time. It decodes a base64-encoded Ruby payload and runs it via eval inside a detached fork (Process.setsid, randomized sleep of 1200+rand(1200) seconds) so execution survives the install process. The decoded payload opens a TCP socket to the hardcoded bare IP 45.138.12.177:8089 and bridges it to /bin/sh, giving an interactive remote shell on the installer's host. Execution is gated by anti-analysis checks that skip CI runners, ephemeral/sandbox hosts, generated usernames, analysis paths, and low-uptime machines, firing only when developer artifacts such as ~/.ssh, ~/.gitconfig, ~/.npmrc, ~/.gem/credentials, or ~/.bundle are present on the host. Package identity is inconsistent: the gem is named seed-phrase-validator, the README is titled bitcoin-rpc-lite, and the makefile target is bitcoin_rpc_lite_native, with no matching native sources in the tree.

Source: ossf-package-analysis (260c8de6b9fe5e7e977be76b41bc4f7378162aec30f7ef564a9c1760c1b64344)

The OpenSSF Package Analysis project identified 'seed-phrase-validator' @ 0.9.1 (rubygems) as malicious.

It is considered malicious because:

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

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