JavaScript library updated to wipe files from Russian computers

The developer of JavaScript library node-ipc, which is used by the popular vue.js framework, deliberately introduced a critical security vulnerability that, for some netizens, would destroy their computers' files.

Brandon Nozaki Miller, aka RIAEvangelist on GitHub, created node-ipc, which is fetched about a million times a week from the NPM registry, and is described as an "inter-process communication module for Node, supporting Unix sockets, TCP, TLS, and UDP."

It appears Miller intentionally changed his code to overwrite the host system's data, then changed the code to display a message calling for world peace, as a protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. GitHub on Wednesday declared this a critical vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-23812.

"The malicious code was intended to overwrite arbitrary files dependent upon the geo-location of the user IP address," the Microsoft-owned biz said.

Between March 7 and March 8, versions 10.1.1 and 10.1.2 of the library were released. When imported as a dependency and run by a project, these checked if the host machine had an IP address in Russia or Belarus, and if so, overwrote every file it could with a heart symbol. Version 10.1.3 was released soon after without this destructive functionality; 10.1.1 and 10.1.2 were removed from the NPM registry.

Version 11 was then published, and the following week version 9.2.2. Both brought in a new package by Miller called peacenotwar, which creates files called WITH-LOVE-FROM-AMERICA.txt in users' desktop and OneDrive folders. This text file is supposed to contain a message from the developer stating among other things, "war is not the answer, no matter how bad it is," though some folks reported the file was empty.

Whenever node-ipc versions 11 or 9.2.2 are used as a dependency by another project, they bring in peacenotwar and run it, leaving files on people's computers. Version 9.2.2 has disappeared from the NPM registry along with the destructive 10.1.x versions. Vue.js, for one, brought in node-ipc 9.2.2 while it was available, as 9.x is considered a stable branch, meaning there was a period in which some Vue developers may have had .txt files show up unexpectedly.

In other words, not too many people fetched the destructive version, as big apps and frameworks will have used the stable branch, which for a short while dropped .txt files. Anyone using bleeding-edge versions may have had their files vanished, or found manifestos saved to their computers.

A timeline of events has been documented by infosec outfit Snyk. We note that the landing page for the node-ipc module on NPM states "as of v11 this module uses the peacenotwar module."

Miller has defended his peacenotwar module on GitHub, saying "this is all public, documented, licensed and open source." Earlier, there were more than 20 issues flagged against node-ipc about its bad behavior, and just now plenty more over on peacenotwar.

Some of the comments referred to Miller's creation as "protestware." Others might call it malware. The programmer was not available for comment.

Someone even claimed an American NGO had their production files on one system trashed by node-ipc as they were running the library on a monitoring server in Belarus with an IP address that triggered the data-wiping code.

The continuing rise of the Node.js JavaScript framework has given the world a whole new type of software vulnerability.

Node's package manager is NPM, which is overseen and owned these days by GitHub along with NPM's registry of modules. This tool makes it easy for Node apps to automatically pull in other libraries of code directly from online repositories. This results in vast numbers of downloads for many modules, meaning that small code changes can propagate very rapidly across large numbers of computers.

The file-dropping version of node-ipc got sucked into version 3.1 of Unity Hub, a tool for the extremely popular Unity games engine – although it was removed the same day.

"This hot-fix eliminates an issue where a third-party library was able to create an empty text file on the desktop of people using this release version," the Unity team wrote. "While it was a nuisance, the issue did not include malicious functionality. Any user that had this file appear on their desktop after updating the Unity Hub can delete this file."

This is far from the first time something like this has happened. In 2016, a developer removed his tiny leftpad library from NPM, breaking thousands of other apps. Earlier this year, another developer added a breaking change to his library as a protest.

Infosec firm WhiteSource said earlier this year it detected in 2021 1,300 malicious npm packages. It reported them to npm, which quietly removed them. ®