Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (NORNPM1784025857)
The details regarding individual company incidents & reports gives you full view from every side.
Rankiteo Score Impact Analysis
Key Highlights From The Incident Analysis
- Timeline of Northstar Tutoring's Cyber Attack and lateral movement inside company's environment.
- Overview of affected data sets, including SSNs and PHI, and why they materially increase incident severity.
- How Rankiteo’s incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score.
- How this cyber incident impacts Northstar Tutoring Rankiteo cyber scoring and cyber rating.
- Rankiteo’s MITRE ATT&CK correlation analysis for this incident, with associated confidence level.
Full Incident Analysis Transcript
In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Northstar Tutoring breach identified under incident ID NORNPM1784025857.
The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Northstar Tutoring's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/northstar-tutoring, the number of followers: 126, the industry type: Non-profit Organizations and the number of employees: 11 employees
After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 762 and after the incident was 735 with a difference of -27 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.
In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on Northstar Tutoring and their customers.
On 27 May 2024, Students and visitors to proxy pages disclosed Supply Chain Attack, DDoS Attack issues under the banner "Malicious npm Packages Disguised as School Wi-Fi Bypass Tools Hijack Browsers for DDoS Attacks".
Researchers from JFrog and SafeDep uncovered a campaign involving nearly 150 malicious npm packages masquerading as legitimate school Wi-Fi bypass tools.
The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting Browsers of visitors to proxy pages, Web servers targeted by DDoS.
In response, moved swiftly to contain the threat with measures like Blocking identified infrastructure domains, reviewing web filtering logs, and began remediation that includes Removal of malicious npm packages, monitoring for unusual browser upload activity.
The case underscores how Ongoing, teams are taking away lessons such as The campaign's design made it difficult to detect and mitigate, as victims weren't limited to developers and the malicious code executed post-page load. Takedowns were hindered by the use of multiple package names and hosting locations, and recommending next steps like Block identified infrastructure domains, review web filtering logs for visits to tutoring-themed proxy pages, and monitor for unusual browser upload activity.
Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.
MITRE ATT&CK® Correlation Analysis
Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Supply Chain Compromise: Compromise Software Supply Chain (T1195.002) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating nearly 150 malicious npm packages masquerading as legitimate school Wi-Fi bypass tools and User Execution: Malicious Link (T1204.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating visitors to the hosted sites were exposed to popunder ads, tracking scripts. Under the Execution tactic, the analysis identified Exploitation for Client Execution (T1203) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating dynamically altered functionality via external scripts after visitors loaded the pages and Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript (T1059.007) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating loaded remote JavaScript from a mutable GitHub branch. Under the Persistence tactic, the analysis identified Browser Extensions (T1176) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating a service worker intercepted navigation events and injected scripts. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Obfuscated Files or Information (T1027) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating malicious npm packages masquerading as legitimate school Wi-Fi bypass tools, Masquerading: Match Legitimate Name or Location (T1036.005) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating packages branded under names like Lucide Proxy, Riverbend Tutoring, and Northstar Tutoring, and Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion: Time Based Evasion (T1497.003) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating the campaign operated in waves, with the first detected on May 27 and a second on July 8. Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Network Denial of Service (T1498) with high confidence (90%), supported by evidence indicating flooded targets with traffic, including repeated large POST requests to an education-related site and Endpoint Denial of Service: Application or System Exploitation (T1499.004) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating abused WebSocket connections, rapidly opening and closing links to strain server resources. Under the Command and Control tactic, the analysis identified Application Layer Protocol: Web Protocols (T1071.001) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating loaded remote JavaScript from a mutable GitHub branch and Ingress Tool Transfer (T1105) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating dynamically altered functionality via external scripts after visitors loaded the pages. Under the Resource Development tactic, the analysis identified Obtain Capabilities: Code Signing Certificates (T1588.003) with moderate confidence (50%), supported by evidence indicating malicious npm packages masquerading as legitimate tools and Acquire Infrastructure: Web Services (T1583.006) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating leveraged npm’s infrastructure to distribute static web assets. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.
Sources & References
- Northstar Tutoring Rankiteo Cyber Incident Details: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/northstar-tutoring/incident/NORNPM1784025857
- Northstar Tutoring CyberSecurity Rating page: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/northstar-tutoring
- Northstar Tutoring Rankiteo Cyber Incident Blog Article: https://blog.rankiteo.com/nornpm1784025857-npm-northstar-tutoring-cyber-attack-may-2026/
- Northstar Tutoring CyberSecurity Score History: https://www.rankiteo.com/company/northstar-tutoring/history
- Northstar Tutoring CyberSecurity Incident Source: https://cybersecuritynews.com/150-npm-packages-promises-wi-fi-bypass-students/
- Rankiteo A.I CyberSecurity Rating methodology: https://www.rankiteo.com/Images/rankiteo_algo.pdf
- Rankiteo TPRM Scoring methodology: https://static.rankiteo.com/model/rankiteo_tprm_methodology.pdf