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…
Two beta versions in the @joyfill npm scope, published on July 28, 2026, carried the same blockchain C2 loader seen in the earlier astro.config.mjs attack, which the article ties to the PolinRider campaign. The attacker published through the legitimate scope (a form-builder SDK with three maintainers) under the beta dist-tag. The maliciou…
On August 28, 2026, an attacker published 10 malicious versions of the npm package @7nohe/openapi-react-query-codegen (about 671K downloads/month) without stealing any credentials. They abused the repository's GitHub Actions release.yml workflow, which had an issuecomment trigger with no author-association gate. Commenting npm publish on …
On August 20, 2026, a compromised release of the Rust crate arrayref (0.3.10, about 245 million all-time downloads) appeared on crates.io. It added a dependency on the typosquatted crate proc-macro1 1.0.107, whose build script downloads and runs a remote binary at compile time. The maintainer account droundy appears to have been compromis…
SafeDep found a remote access implant in mathmain, an npm package that copies mathjs, and in two sibling packages, mathsbase and math-universe. The malicious code ships AES-256-GCM encrypted and activates only when lusolve() is called with matrix data whose LU lower factor serializes to a specific password. Once decrypted, the implant tak…
On October 5, 2026, the RubyGems account reqthrottle3474 published 42 malicious gems within about an hour. Most are named for cryptocurrency developer tooling (e.g. eth-keystore-utils, bip39-wordlist-utils, btc-wallet-tools), and the last 16 typosquat real gems (bitcion, etheremu.rb, kecack, solaan-ruby). The code runs during gem install …
On September 8, 2026, an attacker added a malicious source dependency to Deep-Live-Cam, a Python face-swapping app with about 96,600 GitHub stars. Commit 7895c547 ("chore: update requirements.txt") rewrote 18 dependency entries and added requests @ git+https://github.com/pypls/requests.git. This points installation to a lookalike reposito…
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…
On 4 August 2026, an npm worm published 2,234 poisoned versions across 444 package names, using credentials from twelve organisations. Affected scopes include @ornikar, @deliveroo, @onereach, @or-sdk, @servicetitan, @qlik, @picsart, and the keyv and cacheable families. The keyv, flat-cache, file-entry-cache and cacheable-request packages …
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…
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…
SafeDep identified a malicious tensorlake npm release, version 0.5.144 (about 106,000 monthly downloads), that ran a Mini Shai-Hulud worm on install. It was published at 01:12:07 UTC on 8 October and flagged by SafeDep eight minutes later. The attacker used a repository administrator account to commit the payload to main through the GitHu…
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-…
Researchers at SafeDep analyzed a macOS implant recovered from a compromised workstation. Infection began on 2026-07-26 with a paid YouTube video ad impersonating TradingView that led to a fake .pkg installer. The malware is a remote-controlled task runner, not a single-purpose stealer. It persists via a LaunchAgent that re-fetches a shel…
SafeDep reports that the npm package imgdecode (versions 1.0.0-1.0.3, publisher malfexteste8) is part of the MALFEX campaign, which targets Windows developers. After npm removed earlier JavaScript loaders, the operator moved the loader logic into a compiled Node.js native addon (a Windows DLL). On require('imgdecode') from an interactive …