Backdoor code found in 11 Ruby libraries

Maintainers of the RubyGems package repository have yanked 18 malicious versions of 11 Ruby libraries that contained a backdoor mechanism and were caught inserting code that launched hidden cryptocurrency mining operations inside other people’s Ruby projects. The malicious code was first discovered yesterday inside four versions of rest-client, an extremely popular Ruby library. According to an analysis by Jan Dintel, a Dutch Ruby developer, the malicious code found in rest-client would collect and send the URL and environment variables of a compromised system to a remote server in Ukraine.

Backdoor discovered in Ruby strong_password library

An eagle-eyed developer has discovered a backdoor recently sneaked into a library (or ‘gem’) used by Ruby on Rails (RoR) web apps to check password strength. A close shave, then. While the Ruby scripting language and RoR aren’t as popular as they once were, they’re still embedded in numerous enterprise development environments, an unknown number of which might have used the library, strong_password, in its infected version 0.0.7.