Rogue NuGet Impersonates Tracer.Fody, Orchestrates Multi-Year Crypto Wallet Theft
Between February 2020 and December 2025, a malicious NuGet package named "Tracer.Fody.NLog" posed as the legitimate .NET tracing library, Tracer.Fody, and was covertly distributed via typosquatting and mimicking developer identities. The package, uploaded by a threat actor under the handle "csnemess," evaded detection for almost six years, collecting over 2,000 downloads. Instead of offering legitimate functionality, this package deployed a wallet stealer: scanning the default Stratis wallet directory on Windows systems, exfiltrating wallet data and passwords to threat actor infrastructure hosted in Russia, with attackers leveraging crafted code and hidden routines to bypass superficial code reviews. The prolonged success of this attack underscores the persistent risk supply chain threats pose to open-source ecosystems, especially for developer tools and libraries. It highlights attackers’ sophistication in mimicking trusted maintainers, the difficulty of detecting such manipulation, and ongoing regulatory and security pressures to improve package repository hygiene and detection.
Kill Chain