CRITICAL RubyGems Malware

Malicious code in sol-mint-utils (RubyGems)

MAL-2026-17795

Published · Modified

Dependency scanning

Check whether sol-mint-utils 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 (2940bc600ade9f91afdc44ccc04cdab589d276b0504b3f12ffb4a4e827920bd9)

The gem ships a native-extension stub (extconf.rb) that gem install executes automatically, but no C/C++ sources accompany it and lib/sol_mint_utils.rb is an inert stub (defines VERSION and returns 'ok'). The README advertises an unrelated package name (bitcoin-rpc-lite), confirming the gem's declared purpose is a cover. extconf.rb base64-decodes a Ruby payload and eval's it inside a forked/detached process; the decoded payload opens a TCPSocket to the hardcoded host 45.138.12.177 on port 8089 and bridges a /bin/sh session over the socket via IO.popen and IO.copy_stream, granting the operator an interactive reverse shell on the installer's machine. Execution is gated by anti-analysis checks: CI environment variables, hostname patterns (uvm/firecracker/sandbox/vagrant), generated usernames, analysis working directories (/opt/rubygems, /tmp, /workspace), and short /proc/uptime values all suppress the payload, which fires only when developer artifacts such as ~/.ssh, ~/.gitconfig, and ~/.gem/credentials are present on the host.

Source: ossf-package-analysis (0934d5fc248fa591a304d4debc96360b69a48fd7ada21ae17e9952fdd19e9342)

The OpenSSF Package Analysis project identified 'sol-mint-utils' @ 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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