NPM

13 Articles

This Week In Security: Landfall, Imunify AV, And Sudo Rust

November 14, 2025 by 7 Comments

Let’s talk about LANDFALL. That was an Android spyware campaign specifically targeted at Samsung devices. The discovery story is interesting, and possibly an important clue to understanding this particular bit of commercial malware. Earlier this year Apple’s iOS was patched for a flaw in the handling of DNG (Digital NeGative) images, and WhatsApp issued an advisory with a second iOS vulnerability, that together may have been used in attacks in the wild.

Researchers at Unit 42 went looking for real-world examples of this iOS threat campaign, and instead found DNG images that exploited a similar-yet-distinct vulnerability in a Samsung image handling library. These images had a zip file appended to the end of these malicious DNG files. The attack seems to be launched via WhatsApp messaging, just like the iOS attack. That .zip contains a pair of .so shared object files, that are loaded to manipulate the system’s SELinux protections and install the long term spyware payload.

The earliest known sample of this spyware dates to July of 2024, and Samsung patched the DNG handling vulnerability in April 2025. Apple patched the similar DNG problem in August of 2025. The timing and similarities do suggest that these two spyware campaigns may have been related. Unit 42 has a brief accounting of the known threat actors that could have been behind LANDFALL, and concludes that there just isn’t enough solid evidence to make a determination.

Not as Bad as it Looks

Watchtowr is back with a couple more of their unique vulnerability write-ups. The first is a real tease, as they found a way to leak a healthy chunk of memory from Citrix NetScaler machines. The catch is that the memory leak is a part of an error message, complaining that user authentication is disabled. This configuration is already not appropriate for deployment, and the memory leak wasn’t assigned a CVE.

There was a second issue in the NetScaler system, an open redirect in the login system. This is where an attacker can craft a malicious link that points to a trusted NetScaler machine, and if a user follows the link, the NetScaler will redirect the user to a location specified in the malicious link. It’s not a high severity vulnerability, but still got a CVE and a fix. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Landfall, Imunify AV, And Sudo Rust” →

This Week In Security: Bogus Ransom, WordPress Plugins, And KASLR

November 7, 2025 by 16 Comments

There’s another ransomware story this week, but this one comes with a special twist. If you’ve followed this column for long, you’re aware that ransomware has evolved beyond just encrypting files. Perhaps we owe a tiny bit of gratitude to ransomware gangs for convincing everyone that backups are important. The downside to companies getting their backups in order is that these criminals are turning to other means to extort payment from victims. Namely, exfiltrating files and releasing them to the public if the victim doesn’t pay up. And this is the situation in which the Akira ransomware actors claim to have Apache’s OpenOffice project.

There’s just one catch. Akira is threatening to release 23 GB of stolen documents, which include employee information — and the Apache Software Foundation says those documents don’t exist. OpenOffice hasn’t received a demand and can’t find any evidence of a breach. It seems likely that Akira has hit some company, but not part of the Apache Software Foundation. Possibly someone that heavily uses OpenOffice, or even provides some level of support for that application. There is one more wrinkle here.

Since Apache OpenOffice is an open source software project, none of our contributors are paid employees for the project or the foundation…

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Bogus Ransom, WordPress Plugins, And KASLR” →

PhantomRaven Attack Exploits NPM’s Unchecked HTTP URL Dependency Feature

October 30, 2025 by 14 Comments
An example of RDD in a package's dependencies list. It's not even counted as a 'real' dependency. (Credit: Koi.ai)
An example of RDD in a package’s dependencies list. It’s not even counted as a ‘real’ dependency. (Credit: Koi.ai)

Having another security threat emanating from Node.js’ Node Package Manager (NPM) feels like a weekly event at this point, but this newly discovered one is among the more refined. It exploits not only the remote dynamic dependencies (RDD) ‘feature’ in NPM, but also uses the increased occurrence of LLM-generated non-existent package names to its advantage. Called ‘slopsquatting’, it’s only the first step in this attack that the researchers over at [Koi] stumbled over by accident.

Calling it the PhantomRaven attack for that cool vibe, they found that it had started in August of 2025, with some malicious packages detected and removed by NPM, but eighty subsequent packages evaded detection. A property of these packages is that in their dependencies list they use RDD to download malicious code from a HTTP URL. It was this traffic to the same HTTP domain that tipped off the researchers.

For some incomprehensible reason, allowing these HTTP URLs as package dependency is an integral part of the RDD feature. Since the malicious URL is not found in the code itself, it will slip by security scanners, nor is the download cached, giving the attackers significantly more control. This fake dependency is run automatically, without user interaction or notification that it has now begun to scan the filesystem for credentials and anything else of use.

The names of the fake packages were also chosen specifically to match incomplete package names that an LLM might spit out, such as unused-import instead of the full package name of eslint-plugin-unused-imports as example. This serves to highlight why you should not only strictly validate direct dependencies, but also their dependencies. As for why RDD is even a thing, this is something that NPM will hopefully explain soon.

Top image: North American Common Raven (Corvus corax principalis) in flight at Muir Beach in Northern California (Credit: Copetersen, Wikimedia)

This Week In Security: The Shai-Hulud Worm, ShadowLeak, And Inside The Great Firewall

September 19, 2025 by 7 Comments

Hardly a week goes by that there isn’t a story to cover about malware getting published to a repository. Last week it was millions of downloads on NPM, but this week it’s something much more concerning. Malware published on NPM is now looking for NPM tokens, and propagating to other NPM packages when found. Yes, it’s a worm, jumping from one NPM package to another, via installs on developer machines.

It does other things too, like grabbing all the secrets it can find when installed on a machine. If the compromised machine has access to a Github account, a new repo is created named Shai-Hulud, borrowed from the name of the sandworms from Dune. The collected secrets and machine info gets uploaded here, and a workflow also uploads any available GitHub secrets to the webhook.site domain.

How many packages are we talking about? At least 187, with some reports of over 500 packages compromised. The immediate attack has been contained, as NPM has worked to remove the compromised packages, and apparently has added filtering code that blocks the upload of compromised packages.

So far there hasn’t been an official statement on the worm from NPM or its parent companies, GitHub or Microsoft. Malicious packages uploaded to NPM is definitely nothing new. But this is the first time we’ve seen a worm that specializes in NPM packages. It’s not a good step for the trustworthiness of NPM or the direct package distribution model.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: The Shai-Hulud Worm, ShadowLeak, And Inside The Great Firewall” →

This Week In Security: NPM, Kerbroasting, And The Rest Of The Story

September 12, 2025 by 9 Comments

Two billion downloads per week. That’s the download totals for the NPM packages compromised in a supply-chain attack this week. Ninety-nine percent of the cloud depends on one of the packages, and one-in-ten cloud environments actually included malicious code as a result of the hack. Take a moment to ponder that. In a rough estimate, ten percent of the Internet was pwned by a single attack.

What extremely sophisticated technique was used to pull off such an attack? A convincing-looking phishing email sent from the newly registered npmjs.help domain. [qix] is the single developer of many of these packages, and in the midst of a stressful week, fell for the scam. We could refer to the obligatory XKCD 2347 here. It’s a significant problem with the NPM model that a single developer falling for a phishing email can expose the entire Internet to such risk. Continue reading “This Week In Security: NPM, Kerbroasting, And The Rest Of The Story” →

This Week In Security: Npm Timing Leak, Siemens Universal Key, And PHP In PNG

October 14, 2022 by 12 Comments

First up is some clever wizardry from the [Aqua Nautilus] research team, who discovered a timing attack that leaks information about private npm packages. The setup is this, npm hosts both public and private node.js packages. The public ones are available to everyone, but the private packages are “scoped”, meaning they live within a private namespace, “@owner/packagename” and are inaccessible to the general public. Trying to access the package results in an HTTP 404 error — the same error as trying to pull a package that doesn’t exist.


The clever bit is to keep trying, and really pay attention to the responses. Use npm’s API to request info on your target package, five times in a row. If the package name isn’t in use, all five requests will take the expected amount of time. That request lands at the service’s backend, a lookup is performed, and you get the response. On the flipside if your target package does exist, but is privately scoped, the first request returns with the expected delay, and the other four requests return immediately. It appears that npm has front-end that can cache a 404 response for a private package. That response time discrepancy means you can map out the private package names used by a given organization in their private scope.

Now this is all very interesting, but it turns into a plausible attack when combined with typosquatting and dependency confusion issues. Those attacks are two approaches to the same goal, get a node.js deployment to run a malicious package instead of the legitimate one the developer intended. One depends on typos, but dependency confusion just relies on a developer not explicitly defining the scope of a package.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Npm Timing Leak, Siemens Universal Key, And PHP In PNG” →

This Week In Security: NPM Vandalism, Simulating Reboots, And More

January 14, 2022 by 33 Comments

We’ve covered quite a few stories about malware sneaking into NPM and other JavaScript repositories. This is a bit different. This time, a JS programmer vandalized his own packages. It’s not even malware, perhaps we should call it protestware? The two packages, colors and faker are both popular, with a combined weekly download of nearly 23 million. Their author, [Marak] added a breaking update to each of them. These libraries now print a header of LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY, and then either random characters, or very poor ASCII art. It’s been confirmed that this wasn’t an outside attacker, but [Marak] breaking his own projects on purpose. Why?

It seems like this story starts back in late 2020, when [Marak] lost quite a bit in a fire, and had to ask for money on Twitter. Edit: Thanks to commenter [Jack Dansen] for pointing out an important detail that was missing. Marak was charged for reckless endangerment, and was suspected for possible terrorism aspirations, as bomb-making materials were found in his burned-out apartment. Two weeks later, he tweeted that billions were being made off open source devs’ work, citing a FAANG leak. FAANG is a reference to the big five American tech companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The same day, he opened an issue on Github for faker.js, throwing down an ultimatum: “Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it.”
Continue reading “This Week In Security: NPM Vandalism, Simulating Reboots, And More” →