The Unseen Risks of Open Source Dependencies: The Case of an Abandoned Name
Mend.io research discovered a threat actor takeover of the name ‘gemnasium-gitlab-service', a retired Ruby gem with more than two million downloads. Existing projects that haven't updated their dependencies might unwittingly pull in this new version, assuming it's a continuation of the original. Given that the new gem is now controlled by an unknown entity, it could be altered to include malicious code or to perform undesirable actions.