Attack Against a Major Open-Source Library was Social Engineering

Details emerge on how Axios was infected with a Remote Access Trojan in March, undermining the security in one of the most popular JavaScript libraries that has 100 million downloads weekly. The attack path was a customized social engineering attack against one of the lead maintainers of Axios, impersonating a founder of a respected company. 

AI tools are allowing attackers to create likenesses, generate authentic looking webpages, social profiles, and accounts on sharing tools to convince victims and compel them to undermine their own security. The use of AI allows automation and orchestration for social engineering attacks to both scale and be highly customized to the target.

Every executive, developer, employee, and contractor must become savvier at detecting these evolving types of threats. It only gets tougher as Artificial Intelligence makes social engineering threats amazingly more powerful!

Full post-mortem, provided by the duped maintainer, is available here: https://github.com/axios/axios/issues/10636