Fake GitHub Repositories Deliver StealC and Malware Through AI and Software Lures

Researchers reported a large-scale GitHub malware distribution campaign that has operated since March 2025, using repositories masquerading as cracked browser extensions, gaming cheats, developer tools, and, more recently, fake AI skills and MCP servers. The activity has been tied to a Vietnamese-speaking operator and spans more than 47 GitHub accounts and 600 malicious ZIP archives, with some accounts believed to have been compromised rather than created solely for abuse. The campaign’s social-engineering lures target both general users and developers seeking unofficial software, automation tools, or AI-related components.

The repositories deliver a multi-stage LuaJIT loader chain that ultimately installs the StealC information stealer. Payloads are fetched from GitHub “dead drop” repositories, then decrypted through layered obfuscation including hex, XOR, base64url, and AES-ECB before process hollowing is used for injection. Researchers said the malware also resolves command-and-control infrastructure through Polygon Mainnet smart contracts, allowing operators to rotate C2 URLs or IPs without changing deployed binaries; telemetry linked the activity to detections such as BitDefender Gen:Heur.FakeGit.1 and ESET’s Lua/Agent family, while infrastructure usage heavily overlapped with bulletproof hosting providers including ASN 207957 (Serv.host Group Ltd).