The OpenSourceMalware Show

RubyGems bot attack, ShinyHunters ransom Canvas, and the latest on Mini Shai Hulud

OpenSourceMalware Season 1 Episode 4

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0:00 | 32:51

Join OpenSourceMalware co-founders Jenn Gile and Paul McCarty for episode four!

In this episode:

  • RubyGems bot attack: Hundreds of bots pushed 500-plus packages to RubyGems, some carrying exploits, forcing the registry to shut down new account signups. Jenn and Paul break down why the DDoS label may be misleading and what this exposes about the friction-vs-safety tradeoff every open source registry faces.
  • Canvas ransomware by ShinyHunters: ShinyHunters breached Instructure, the company behind the Canvas LMS used by over 30 million students globally, stealing 3.65TB of data including private messages between students and teachers. Instructure said almost nothing publicly for days. Jenn and Paul discuss the data sensitivity risks for minors and close with breaking news: Instructure paid the ransom.
  • Mini Shai Hulud and TanStack: Team PCP is not connected to the original 2025 Shai Hulud campaign. Paul explains how they used Adnan Khan's GitHub Actions cache poisoning technique to compromise TanStack and 90-plus packages without long-lived credentials, why attestation and trusted publishing didn't stop it, what the CIS country geofencing in the payload actually signals, how malware is now targeting .claude directories on developer machines, why novel malware still dominates the OpenSourceMalware database by volume, and why open sourcing their worm and doing press interviews is likely to hasten Team PCP's capture.

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