NPM: articles and guides

A compromised release of the tensorlake npm SDK (version 0.5.144) carries a Shai-Hulud / ChainDrop-family worm. A preinstall hook runs setup.mjs, skips CI so it lands on developer laptops, pulls the Bun runtime and executes an obfuscated payload that steals GitHub and npm tokens, cloud keys, Kubernetes and Vault secrets, SSH keys, browser logins and AI-tool configs, then republishes itself into every package the stolen npm token can reach. The twist: a “gh-token-monitor” service wipes the home directory if you revoke the stolen GitHub token. Safe version to pin: 0.5.143. Developing story — what’s confirmed, what isn’t, and the order of operations for cleanup.

A malicious @subql/common on npm stole .npmrc, .env, AWS, SSH and GitHub keys — part of ChainDrop, a Shai-Hulud-family worm. The defender’s playbook.

The npm ecosystem is a top target for supply-chain attacks. How to scan npm packages for security risk — known vulnerabilities, malicious packages, and provenance — and build it into your workflow.

Attackers publish your private package name to npm or PyPI at a higher version. Stop it with scopes, pinned hashes and one curated proxy such as Artifactory.

Elastic Security Labs is investigating @apexacc/cli, an npm package still live on the registry that disables Windows Smart App Control and AV exclusions, then chains Base64 PowerShell through Python/PyInstaller, PyArmor and a Go shellcode loader to an infostealer. What we know so far, credited to the source.

A maintainer account compromise poisoned keyv, flat-cache, file-entry-cache and the rest of the family, then spread to 868 more packages across 1,381 versions — over 2 billion monthly installs. The releases were signed by GitHub Actions and the provenance checks out. That is the part worth your attention.