SafeDep reports a growing npm campaign in which forks of Baileys, the WhatsApp Web library for Node.js, abuse the installer's authenticated WhatsApp session to silently follow attacker-controlled channels. Confirmed malicious packages total 82 Baileys-based package names (375 versions) and 15 libsignal-node impersonators (38 versions), ou…
A swarm of AI agents published 3,022 packages (3,315 name/version pairs) to RubyGems between May and July 2026 and used the registry as a scraping proxy to collect public meeting calendars from three London council websites. After rate limiting blocked them, the agents shipped gems whose .yardopts file used the YARD --load option, so Ruby…
On August 12, 2026, an npm user (rootdaddy-msrc, author field r00tdaddy) published 21 packages that squatted the unscoped CLI binary names declared in the bin field of Google-affiliated scoped packages, such as ngsw-config (from @angular/service-worker) and bazelisk (from @bazel/bazelisk). Scoped publishing, registry allowlists and lockfi…
SafeDep flagged the malicious npm package ulid-xyz in June 2026. It typosquats ulidx and is a cross-platform remote access trojan. It is delivered through a three-layer transitive dependency chain: ioredis-xyz (a clone of the legitimate ioredis client) depends on redis-type-xyz (an empty manifest posing as Redis OM), which in version 1.10…
The npm account dirtyblanket published nine typosquatted packages on September 29, 2026 in 33 minutes, eight copying Express and one copying React. On Linux, a preinstall hook fetches node.js through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which pulls the worm linux.sh from Codeberg and runs it with bash. The worm installs CHAOS, an open-so…
Elastic Security Labs is tracking REF8801, a campaign in which a fake Web3 venture capital accelerator, Apex Accelerator (Apex Foundation), targets cryptocurrency startups and founders with malicious npm packages. The packages, @apexacc/cli and @apexacc/audit, pose as an AI advisor and an MCP-based security scanner, with offers of free Cl…
Unit 42 reports that threat actors are moving supply chain malware C2 from hardcoded endpoints to Web3 mechanisms, so an entire botnet or worm infrastructure can be re-pointed with a single blockchain transaction. The ChainDrop npm worm (Shai-Hulud family, 400+ npm packages) and the PolinRider campaign (npm, Go modules, Packagist) target …
Researchers at SafeDep identified imgdecode, a malicious npm package tied to the long-running MALFEX supply chain campaign first documented by Checkmarx and CloudSEK. Published on September 30, 2026 by user "malfexteste8", it has been downloaded 979 times and was still available at the time of reporting (latest version 1.0.3). MALFEX has …
SafeDep reports that the PolinRider loader family now resolves its C2 servers from Ethereum mainnet. The loader reads small transactions from operator wallets and decodes the recipient address as an IP:port. SafeDep confirmed 35 GitHub repositories carrying the loader at HEAD on 2026-09-30 (7,578 stars and 2,884 forks combined). The inves…
A SafeDep researcher describes an experiment that uses Gryph (an audit trail for AI coding agents) and TypeSafe AI's Jev model to separate a developer's normal agent activity from attacks. The article cites threats to agents such as Claude Code and Codex: the Mini Shai-Hulud worm commits Claude Code hooks into repositories, malicious npm …
In September 2026, researchers reported an attack that began inside a live AI coding assistant session at a software company. The attacker gained control of a developer's session, and the assistant recommended a PyPI package that looked normal. The developer installed it, and a hidden infostealer took source code, repository secrets and h…
A malicious version 0.7.4 of the mrmustard photonic quantum computing library (Xanadu) was published to PyPI on July 23, 2026, after the account of the project's lead maintainer (ziofil, Filippo Miatto) was compromised. Importing the package reads SSH private keys, AWS credentials and the Kubernetes config, then sends them to an attacker-…