CRITICAL RubyGems Malware

Malicious code in ton-jetton-tools (RubyGems)

MAL-2026-17797

Published · Modified

Dependency scanning

Check whether ton-jetton-tools 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 (30e70156c49000f2a02130da13465705bea1e9663b3ba57246a4e264bb12db25)

The gem's native-extension build script (extconf.rb) contains a base64-encoded Ruby payload that is decoded and executed via eval during gem install. The decoded payload forks a detached, delayed child process that opens a TCP connection to 45.138.12.177:8089 and bridges the socket to /bin/sh, giving the operator of that endpoint an interactive shell on the installer's host. Execution is gated by anti-analysis checks that skip the payload when the environment looks like CI or a sandbox (CI env vars set, hostname matches sandbox/firecracker/vagrant patterns, auto-generated usernames, CWD under /tmp, /var/tmp, /opt/rubygems, or /workspace, machine uptime under 1800 seconds) and only fires when developer artefacts (~/.ssh, ~/.gitconfig, ~/.npmrc, ~/.gem/credentials, ~/.bundle) are present. The surrounding extconf.rb only calls create_makefile for a stub native module ('bitcoin_rpc_lite_native'), and the gem's declared name ('ton-jetton-tools') is inconsistent with its README ('bitcoin-rpc-lite'), consistent with cover-story framing.

Source: ossf-package-analysis (faf204a450ff3756811f85eb0dc1f394d43f945ba3cd37423cccb8e14c561fff)

The OpenSSF Package Analysis project identified 'ton-jetton-tools' @ 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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