Meet Hades: The malware that lies to AI security agents
Threat actors are continuing their onslaught against software supply chains, now with malware named after death itself. The newly-discovered Hades Campaign is a “highly sophisticated” supply chain compromise that targets Python developer environments and runs as soon as infected packages are imported. It uses the popular Bun toolkit to silently execute multi-layer payloads that can extract sensitive data, move laterally across compromised systems, exploit common security frameworks, and even hijack AI gatekeeper analyzer systems via adversarial prompt injection. Notably, the campaign exploited the popular C++ library ensmallen, as well as packages in the computational biology, bioinformatics, and genotype-phenotype analysis ecosystems. The most novel thing about this malware is its combination of advanced tactics, noted David Shipley of Beauceron Security. He noted that we’ve seen memory-focused malware, we’ve seen attacks that attempt to defuse large language model (LLM) powered analy