List of open-source projects containing protestware

What is "protestware"

ProtestWare is a type of malware with political overtones. Implements unexpected software behavior. Most often, changes do not affect all users, but a certain group according to such criteria as countries, language, time zone, etc. Manifestations can be in the form of displaying political slogans, deliberate failures in the software itself, or causing harm to other user software.

About this list

This list is based on CTO Club List and other sources.

How to update this list

Please open an issue or create a pull request.

Open source projects with protestware

peacenotwar

https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/peacenotwar

If any users are using IP in Russia or Belarus, all their file will be wiped entirely by hearts.

node-ipc

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2022-23812

https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/issues/233 https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/blob/847047cf7f81ab08352038b2204f0e7633449580/dao/ssl-geospec.js https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/commit/1220522453a0388cb4af1a74fe9a0482b6b3a9f3

If any users are using IP in Russia or Belarus, all their file will be wiped entirely with a heart emoji. Manually set a 25% probability at the beginning of the timeout, so that this thing looks more like a floating bug than something intentional.

This affects the package node-ipc from 10.1.1 and before 10.1.3. From versions 11.0.0 onwards, instead of having malicious code directly in the source of this package, node-ipc imports the peacenotwar package

es5-ext

The popular library https://www.npmjs.com/package/es5-ext which has not been updated for 2 years has started receiving regular updates that contain both propaganda and timezone code that increases resource utilization. Check this file - _postinstall.js

https://github.com/medikoo/es5-ext/issues/116 https://github.com/medikoo/es5-ext/commit/28de285ed433b45113f01e4ce7c74e9a356b2af2

Has anti-war manifest.

RedisDesktopManager

https://github.com/uglide/RedisDesktopManager/commit/8b2b357d9d233100f84a69f81ed22b8caa04fa22

Russian language was removed.

pnpm

https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/commit/3c328ec465c597ff558c1f38afbfe2a0c1b02a83 https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/commit/0066c11b9779971349d323c9fffced0271535cb7

Block access to pnpm.io from Russia an Belarus

yandex-xml-library

Un-Official Yandex-XML PHP library https://packagist.org/packages/anton-shevchuk/yandex-xml-library

A version of the package with a political slogan has been added to packagist, and the sources have been removed from the github. The result is a broken project build.

retejs/rete

https://github.com/retejs/rete/commit/d3ff828a41f96e34f04619eb44c688c913ee8def

"StandWithUkraine" postinstall message

composer

Package Repository Website for Composer (PHP)

https://github.com/composer/packagist/commit/86244a3695fcaaac9c5ba4257a4314eae1c6d981

Message "StandWithUkrane"

PHPUnit

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/commit/4634e702b5f05f5e948e531eb8b4fc19be40610c

Message "StandWithUkraine"

Mistape WordPress plugin

https://wordpress.org/plugins/mistape/

Through a vulnerability in the popular Mistape plugin, an attacker gains access to the administrator sections, uploads the UnderConstruction plugin, with which it displays arbitrary information on the main page of the site. Usually this is a widget on the topic of current events in Ukraine. The author of the plugin on February 24 made changes to it. I waited until the update was distributed among users and began to exploit the vulnerability that was included there in a few days. https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/2684407/

Onefetch

https://github.com/o2sh/onefetch

When installing the program, it replaces the libgcc_s.so.1 library, the system stops responding and after rebooting the system gives a kernel panic error.

Projects, where protestware were removed

Vue CLI

https://github.com/vuejs/vue-cli/issues/7054

Transitive dependency on node-ipc.

node-ipc has been version-locked to a previous release by vue/cli-shared-utils, perhaps one of the more popular downstream consumers of the package.

The (transitive) vulnerability in @vue/cli has been fixed. Please update to the latest versions of @vue/cli, either 4.5.16+ or 5.0.3+

Awesome Prometheus Alerts

https://github.com/samber/awesome-prometheus-alerts/commit/6bfcdcca165e57c6fa09a561515c33284caa20c2

Determines the user's active language and redirects to the page with slogans. In the following commits, the code was removed.

filestash

c30a31a583

Using the definition of IP, Zelensky's video message was shown. Now removed

tasmota

https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota/commit/98cbf2587a1a914bbd16996ebb48dd451d3da448

Varies from messages in the log to the inoperability of the device.

The author rolled back the vulnerability under public pressure: https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota/commit/ba32044bb25b820a104428585bf4c91c4e927f88 https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota/commit/b4f99bb74704e4a5f85b7ba9e03b126bf1c43320