NPM | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package named "os-info-checker-es6" that disguises itself as an operating system information utility to stealthily drop a next-stage payload onto compromised systems. "This campaign employs clever Unicode-based steganography to hide its initial malicious code and utilizes a Google Calendar event short link as a dynamic dropper for its final payload," Veracode said in a r eport shared with The Hacker News. "Os-info-checker-es6" was first published in the npm registry on March 19, 2025, by a user named "kim9123." It has been downloaded 2,001 times as of writing. The same user has also uploaded another npm package called "skip-tot" that lists "os-info-checker-es6" as a dependency. The package has been downloaded 94 times . While the initial five versions exhibited no signs of data exfiltration or malicious behavior, a subsequent iteration uploaded on May 7, 2025, has ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged three malicious npm packages that are designed to target the Apple macOS version of Cursor, a popular artificial intelligence (AI)-powered source code editor. "Disguised as developer tools offering 'the cheapest Cursor API,' these packages steal user credentials, fetch an encrypted payload from threat actor-controlled infrastructure, overwrite Cursor's main.js file, and disable auto-updates to maintain persistence," Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said . The packages in question are listed below - sw-cur (2,771 downloads) sw-cur1 (307 downloads), and aiide-cur (163 downloads) All three packages continue to be available for download from the npm registry. "Aiide-cur" was first published on February 14, 2025. It was uploaded by a user named "aiide." The npm library is described as a "command-line tool for configuring the macOS version of the Cursor editor." The other two packages, ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that masquerades as a seemingly harmless Discord-related utility but incorporates a remote access trojan. The package in question is discordpydebug , which was uploaded to PyPI on March 21, 2022. It has been downloaded 11,574 times and continues to be available on the open-source registry. Interestingly, the package has not received any update since then. "At first glance, it appeared to be a simple utility aimed at developers working on Discord bots using the Discord.py library," the Socket Research Team said . "However, the package concealed a fully functional remote access trojan (RAT)." The package, once installed, contacts an external server ("backstabprotection.jamesx123.repl[.]co"), and includes features to read and write arbitrary files based on commands, readfile or writefile, received from the server. The RAT also supports the ability...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three malicious Go modules that include obfuscated code to fetch next-stage payloads that can irrevocably overwrite a Linux system's primary disk and render it unbootable. The names of the packages are listed below - github[.]com/truthfulpharm/prototransform github[.]com/blankloggia/go-mcp github[.]com/steelpoor/tlsproxy "Despite appearing legitimate, these modules contained highly obfuscated code designed to fetch and execute remote payloads," Socket researcher Kush Pandya said . The packages are designed to check if the operating system on which they are being run is Linux, and if so retrieve a next-stage payload from a remote server using wget. The payload is a destructive shell script that overwrites the entire primary disk (" /dev/sda ") with zeroes, effectively preventing the machine from booting up. "This destructive method ensures no data recovery tool or forensic process can restore the data, as...

The Ripple cryptocurrency npm JavaScript library named xrpl.js has been compromised by unknown threat actors as part of a software supply chain attack designed to harvest and exfiltrate users' private keys. The malicious activity has been found to affect five different versions of the package: 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.2.3, 4.2.4, and 2.14.2. The issue has been addressed in versions 4.2.5 and 2.14.3. xrpl.js is a popular JavaScript API for interacting with the XRP Ledger blockchain, also called the Ripple Protocol, a cryptocurrency platform launched by Ripple Labs in 2012. The package has been downloaded over 2.9 million times to date, attracting more than 135,000 weekly downloads. "The official XPRL (Ripple) NPM package was compromised by sophisticated attackers who put in a backdoor to steal cryptocurrency private keys and gain access to cryptocurrency wallets," Aikido Security's Charlie Eriksen said . The malicious code changes have been found to be introduced by a...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered three malicious packages in the npm registry that masquerade as a popular Telegram bot library but harbor SSH backdoors and data exfiltration capabilities. The packages in question are listed below - node-telegram-utils (132 downloads) node-telegram-bots-api (82 downloads) node-telegram-util (73 downloads) According to supply chain security firm Socket, the packages are designed to mimic node-telegram-bot-api , a popular Node.js Telegram Bot API with over 100,000 weekly downloads. The three libraries are still available for download. "While that number may sound modest, it only takes a single compromised environment to pave the way for wide-scale infiltration or unauthorized data access," security researcher Kush Pandya said . "Supply chain security incidents repeatedly show that even a handful of installs can have catastrophic repercussions, especially when attackers gain direct access to developer systems or produc...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a malicious Python library on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that facilitates unauthorized music downloads from music streaming service Deezer. The package in question is automslc, which has been downloaded over 104,000 times to date. First published in May 2019, it remains available on PyPI as of writing. "Although automslc, which has been downloaded over 100,000 times, purports to offer music automation and metadata retrieval, it covertly bypasses Deezer's access restrictions by embedding hardcoded credentials and communicating with an external command-and-control (C2) server," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in a report published today. Specifically, the package is designed to log into the French music streaming platform via user-supplied and hard-coded credentials, gather track-related metadata, and download full audio files in violation of Deezer's API terms. The package also periodicall...

Cybersecurity researchers have identified three sets of malicious packages across the npm and Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that come with capabilities to steal data and even delete sensitive data from infected systems. The list of identified packages is below - @async-mutex/mutex, a typosquat of async-mute (npm) dexscreener, which masquerades as a library for accessing liquidity pool data from decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and interacting with the DEX Screener platform (npm) solana-transaction-toolkit (npm) solana-stable-web-huks (npm) cschokidar-next, a typosquat of chokidar (npm) achokidar-next, a typosquat of chokidar (npm) achalk-next, a typosquat of chalk (npm) csbchalk-next, a typosquat of chalk (npm) cschalk, a typosquat of chalk (npm) pycord-self, a typosquat of discord.py-self (PyPI) Supply chain security company Socket, which discovered the packages, said the first four packages are designed to intercept Solana private keys and transmit them throug...

Cybersecurity researchers have revealed several malicious packages on the npm registry that have been found impersonating the Nomic Foundation's Hardhat tool in order to steal sensitive data from developer systems. "By exploiting trust in open source plugins, attackers have infiltrated these platforms through malicious npm packages, exfiltrating critical data such as private keys, mnemonics, and configuration details," the Socket research team said in an analysis. Hardhat is a development environment for Ethereum software, incorporating various components for editing, compiling, debugging and deploying smart contracts and decentralized apps (dApps). The list of identified counterfeit packages is as follows - nomicsfoundations @nomisfoundation/hardhat-configure installedpackagepublish @nomisfoundation/hardhat-config @monicfoundation/hardhat-config @nomicsfoundation/sdk-test @nomicsfoundation/hardhat-config @nomicsfoundation/web3-sdk @nomicsfoundation/sdk-...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package on the npm package registry that masquerades as a library for detecting vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts but, in reality, drops an open-source remote access trojan called Quasar RAT onto developer systems. The heavily obfuscated package, named ethereumvulncontracthandler , was published to npm on December 18, 2024, by a user named "solidit-dev-416." As of writing, it continues to be available for download. It has been downloaded 66 times to date. "Upon installation, it retrieves a malicious script from a remote server, executing it silently to deploy the RAT on Windows systems," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in an analysis published last month. The malicious code embedded into ethereumvulncontracthandler is obscured with multiple layers of obfuscation, leveraging techniques like Base64- and XOR-encoding, as well as minification to resist analysis and detection efforts. ...

The developers of Rspack have revealed that two of their npm packages, @rspack/core and @rspack/cli , were compromised in a software supply chain attack that allowed a malicious actor to publish malicious versions to the official package registry with cryptocurrency mining malware. Following the discovery , versions 1.1.7 of both libraries have been unpublished from the npm registry. The latest safe version is 1.1.8. "They were released by an attacker who gained unauthorized npm publishing access, and contain malicious scripts," software supply chain security firm Socket said in an analysis. Rspack is billed as an alternative to the webpack , offering a "high performance JavaScript bundler written in Rust." Originally developed by ByteDance, it has since been adopted by several companies such as Alibaba, Amazon, Discord, and Microsoft, among others. The npm packages in question, @rspack/core, and @rspack/cli, attract weekly downloads of over 300,000 and 145...

Threat actors have been observed uploading malicious typosquats of legitimate npm packages such as typescript-eslint and @types/node that have racked up thousands of downloads on the package registry. The counterfeit versions, named @typescript_eslinter/eslint and types-node , are engineered to download a trojan and retrieve second-stage payloads, respectively. "While typosquatting attacks are hardly new, the effort spent by nefarious actors on these two libraries to pass them off as legitimate is noteworthy," Sonatype's Ax Sharma said in an analysis published Wednesday. "Furthermore, the high download counts for packages like "types-node" are signs that point to both some developers possibly falling for these typosquats, and threat actors artificially inflating these counts to boost the trustworthiness of their malicious components." The npm listing for @typescript_eslinter/eslint, Sonatype's analysis revealed, points to a phony GitHub repo...

Cybersecurity researchers are alerting to a software supply chain attack targeting the popular @solana/web3.js npm library that involved pushing two malicious versions capable of harvesting users' private keys with an aim to drain their cryptocurrency wallets. The attack has been detected in versions 1.95.6 and 1.95.7. Both these versions are no longer available for download from the npm registry. The package is widely used, attracting over 400,000 weekly downloads. "These compromised versions contain injected malicious code that is designed to steal private keys from unsuspecting developers and users, potentially enabling attackers to drain cryptocurrency wallets," Socket said in a report. @solana/web3.js is an npm package that can be used to interact with the Solana JavaScript software development kit (SDK) for building Node.js and web apps. According to Datadog security researcher Christophe Tafani-Dereeper , "the backdoor inserted in v1.95.7 adds an ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a software supply chain attack that has remained active for over a year on the npm package registry by starting off as an innocuous library and later adding malicious code to steal sensitive data and mine cryptocurrency on infected systems. The package, named @0xengine/xmlrpc , was originally published on October 2, 2023 as a JavaScript-based XML-RPC server and client for Node.js. It has been downloaded 1,790 times to date and remains available for download from the repository. Checkmarx , which discovered the package, said the malicious code was strategically introduced in version 1.3.4 a day later, harboring functionality to harvest valuable information such as SSH keys, bash history, system metadata, and environment variables every 12 hours, and exfiltrate it via services like Dropbox and file.io. "The attack achieved distribution through multiple vectors: direct npm installation and as a hidden dependency in a legitimate-looking ...

A new campaign has targeted the npm package repository with malicious JavaScript libraries that are designed to infect Roblox users with open-source stealer malware such as Skuld and Blank-Grabber . "This incident highlights the alarming ease with which threat actors can launch supply chain attacks by exploiting trust and human error within the open source ecosystem, and using readily available commodity malware, public platforms like GitHub for hosting malicious executables, and communication channels like Discord and Telegram for C2 operations to bypass traditional security measures," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The list of malicious packages is as follows - node-dlls (77 downloads) ro.dll (74 downloads) autoadv (66 downloads) rolimons-api (107 downloads) It's worth pointing out that "node-dlls" is an attempt on part of the threat actor to masquerade as the legitimate node-dll packa...

An ongoing campaign is targeting npm developers with hundreds of typosquat versions of their legitimate counterparts in an attempt to trick them into running cross-platform malware. The attack is notable for utilizing Ethereum smart contracts for command-and-control (C2) server address distribution, according to independent findings from Checkmarx , Phylum , and Socket published over the past few days. The activity was first flagged on October 31, 2024, although it's said to have been underway at least a week prior. No less than 287 typosquat packages have been published to the npm package registry. "As this campaign began to unfold in earnest, it became clear that this attacker was in the early stages of a typosquat campaign targeting developers intending to use the popular Puppeteer, Bignum.js, and various cryptocurrency libraries," Phylum said. The packages contain obfuscated JavaScript that's executed during (or post) the installation process, ultimately le...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a number of suspicious packages published to the npm registry that are designed to harvest Ethereum private keys and gain remote access to the machine via the secure shell (SSH) protocol. The packages attempt to "gain SSH access to the victim's machine by writing the attacker's SSH public key in the root user's authorized_keys file," software supply chain security company Phylum said in an analysis published last week. The list of packages identified as part of the campaign, which aim to impersonate the legitimate ethers package , are as follows - ethers-mew (62 downloads) ethers-web3 (110 downloads) ethers-6 (56 downloads) ethers-eth (58 downloads) ethers-aaa (781 downloads) ethers-audit (69 downloads) ethers-test (336 downloads) Some of these packages, most of which have been published by accounts named "crstianokavic" and "timyorks," are believed to have been released for testing purpose...