Self-propagating malware worm that infects npm packages, stealing developer credentials and tokens while spreading through open-source supply chains.
Two compromised maintainer accounts pushed a GhostAction workflow into 346 GitHub repositories on Oct. 8, according to Socket's research team. GitGuardian, which named the campaign, is still reviewing the wave against its own data.
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Tensorlake's npm SDK 0.5.144 carried a Shai-Hulud worm on October 8 that steals GitHub and npm tokens, cloud keys and AI coding-tool configs. A dev.to write-up of StepSecurity's teardown says revoking the stolen GitHub token triggers an rm -rf ~/, so the service must go first.
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Tensorlake's npm SDK 0.5.144 runs a credential-stealing worm from a preinstall hook at install time, Socket reported. According to Socket's analysis, any secret reachable from a workstation or build runner that installed the release may be exposed.
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Unit 42 says supply-chain attackers have moved command-and-control into blockchain smart contracts, so one transaction can re-point an entire botnet or worm. Defenders' useful choke points are now developer machines, CI runners and the chain lookup itself.
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Two men arrested in Australia this week are alleged TeamPCP members. The AFP estimate filed alongside the case puts the worm's take at more than 500,000 credentials and 300GB of data, and that scale makes token lifetime the live question.
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Two TeamPCP-linked actors are under arrest after package compromises that ReversingLabs says caused a suspected hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The waves since September 2025 began with a stolen publishing credential and reached victims through updates their own pipelines installed.
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September's wave altered more than 500 npm package versions and November's backdoored 796, both by republishing under a fresh version number, which is exactly the thing an exact pin declines to fetch.
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ReversingLabs found tw-pkgprobe-7731 claiming to be an authorized Twilio HackerOne research probe while it tried to exfiltrate data, and its 2026 count of malicious npm packages passed all of 2024 by the end of August.
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GitGuardian says the ChainDrop worm reached 444 npm packages by planting a SessionStart hook in Claude Code and a folderOpen task in VS Code, and the publishing credential it steals is used to republish inside the same session.
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GitGuardian counted a 34 percent rise in new leaked secrets against 43 percent growth in commits, so the rate per commit slipped about six percent even as the raw total set the company's single-year record.
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GTIG's 2026 accounting traces one crew from package-registry compromises on PyPI, npm and Docker Hub to agent instructions that planned and ran the campaign, then out to public malware releases anyone can reuse.
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Aikido says the pair, both in their early 20s, ran TeamPCP's npm supply chain campaigns with a worm they cloned from Shai-Hulud. Whoever wrote the original is still unidentified, and the code is still published.
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Four core SAP build packages shipped an identical 11.6MB credential stealer. Because npm trusted the whole cap-js repository rather than one branch, a commit pushed to an unused branch was enough to publish them.
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Mandiant traced the Q2 2026 campaign to an AI coding chatbot, one prompt and a set of agent instructions that ran the scanning pipeline, fixed its own errors and rotated IPs with nobody at the keyboard.
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The provenance on @7nohe/openapi-react-query-codegen was accurate about every question it was built to answer, which is why the Docker Security Dispatch reaches instead for a five-day resolution cooldown that npm ci does not apply.
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The count of places this worm looks for secrets more than doubled between builds, and the additions sit in CI/CD and developer tooling, which is where the standing tokens that make a supply chain attack portable actually live.
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Shai-Hulud is on its fourth iteration. Trivy, Axios and LiteLLM have all shipped compromised releases. ReversingLabs is giving away a plugin that checks every package request against a reputation index inside Artifactory itself.
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StepSecurity's first annual report logs 56 confirmed supply chain compromises and says plainly that these are its own alerts. The February change is the finding; explaining it is the hard part.
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Unit 42 says a worm hidden in more than 400 npm packages read GitHub Actions runner memory for temporary OIDC tokens. An SBOM generated at the end of the build would not have seen any of it.
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The poisoned keyv releases were signed by GitHub Actions and the attestation was accurate. It certified a build whose source had already been taken over.
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