Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On March 13th 2025, our malware analysis engine alerted us to a potential malicious package that was added to NPM. First indications suggested this would be a clear-cut case, however, when we started peeling back the layers things weren’t quite as they seemed. Here is a story about how sophisticated nation state actors can hide malware within packages.

Our Aikido Intel team has been identifying undisclosed open-source vulnerabilities using LLM-driven analysis and human verification. Now, we’re expanding our supply chain security research to detect and track malware in open-source packages, cheaper, better, & faster than what exists today.

Containerization, a form of lightweight virtualization, lets applications inhabit their own self-contained environments. Each container packages everything an application needs to run – code, runtime, libraries – keeping it neatly separated from everything else. This isolation is a big deal because it means a problem in one container won’t bring down the whole environment.