Supply-chain threat intelligence

Incident detail

criticalpypi·malware·osv

Malicious code in captcha-solve-api (PyPI)

captcha-solve-api

Risk score

92

AI summary

Indexed incident for captcha-solve-api (pypi).

Description

The package advertises itself as a REST client for a captcha-solving API, but the shipped captcha_solve_api module is a ~20-line stub. The tarball's real payload is two top-level modules (_telemetry_init, _telemetry_transport, ~117 KB) installed as global site modules together with a telemetry.pth file copied into site-packages by a custom install command. The.pth contains import _telemetry_init, which Python auto-executes on every interpreter start — independent of whether captcha_solve_api is ever imported. _telemetry_init spawns a daemon thread that instantiates _telemetry_transport.Client and calls initialize()/track(). The runtime collects host identifiers (platform.node() hostname, cpu_count, OS/arch, Python version, session identifiers) and POSTs JSON envelopes to /api/envelope on a destination host that is not hardcoded: a ServiceDiscovery class issues DNS TXT queries to 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 and base64-decodes concatenated TXT chunks to reconstruct the endpoint, allowing the operator to rotate destinations after install and evade domain/IP allowlists. Author metadata is a generic placeholder ('Platform Engineering') and the DSN docstring uses dev@example.com. The 'telemetry'/'analytics SDK' framing does not match the advertised captcha-solving purpose and is not part of the captcha_solve_api namespace.

Technical details

Affected versions

=0.0.1

Indicators

  • affected version=0.0.175%

Timeline

  1. Advisory published
  2. Indexed by ThreatPkg

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