FakeGit Campaign Uses 7,600 GitHub Repositories to Spread SmartLoader Malware
As part of an ongoing campaign known as FakeGit, cybersecurity researchers have found over 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories, of which more than 800 pose as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers or artificial intelligence (AI) talents to distribute a malware family known as SmartLoader.
According to a report shared with The Hacker News by Oleg Zaytsev, principal security researcher at Island, FakeGit employs malicious ZIP files, lookalike developer profiles, replicated projects, and persuasive READMEs to spread SmartLoader malware.
The ultimate objective of these assaults is to use the access provided by SmartLoader to create persistence and propagate secondary payloads, like StealC, an information stealer that can extract a variety of data from infected systems.
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