Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

At 21 Apr, 20:53 GMT+0, our system, Aikido Intel started to alert us to five new package version of the xrpl package. It is the official SDK for the XRP Ledger, with more than 140.000 weekly downloads. We quickly confirmed 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.

The Node ecosystem is built on a foundation of trust — trust that the packages you npm install are doing what they say they do. But that trust is often misplaced. Over the past year, we’ve seen a disturbing trend: a rising number of malicious packages published to npm, often hiding in plain sight. Some are crude proof-of-concepts (PoCs) by researchers, others are carefully crafted backdoors.

‍ On March 14th 2025, we detected a malicious package on npm called node-facebook-messenger-api. At first, it seemed to be pretty run-of-the-mill malware, though we couldn’t tell what the end-goal was. We didn’t think much more of it until April 3rd 2025, when we see the same threat actor expand their attack.