Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

npm shipped a new protection this week for its most depended-on accounts. When npm detects a sensitive action on a high-impact account, like an email swap or the use of a 2FA recovery code, it puts that account into a 72-hour read-only state and sends an alert to the previous email address. The package installs and downloads keep working as normal during this time, and the freeze lifts automatically at the end of the waiting period.

For years, installing an npm package has meant trusting that every package in the dependency tree will behave as expected. Whether code originated from the npm registry, a Git repository, a remote URL, or an installation script buried deep within a transitive dependency, npm would typically execute or retrieve it automatically during the installation process.

An attacker republished the entire @mastra npm scope on June 17, 2026, slipping a single malicious dependency into 143 packages and counting, including @mastra/core, which pulls roughly 4 million downloads a month and has hundreds of dependent projects. The injected dependency, easy-day-js, is a dayjs lookalike whose install hook disables TLS verification, downloads a second-stage payload from a raw IP address, and runs a cross-platform cryptocurrency stealer in the background.

npm's next major release, v12, scheduled to land July 2026, will stop running dependency install scripts by default. We’re relieved to hear it. Turning off install scripts is the most useful change npm could make to its defaults. The community suffered a barrage of supply chain attacks in the last year, like Nx s1ngularity and Shai-Hulud, that exploited postinstall scripts. This npm update is a long-awaited change that will shrink a huge supply chain attack vector.

A supply chain attack is actively spreading through the npm registry by abusing a file most security tooling never looks at: binding.gyp. Instead of relying on the well-monitored preinstall or postinstall lifecycle scripts, the malware ships a weaponized binding.gyp that triggers node-gyp to execute attacker-controlled code automatically during npm install.

On June 1, 2026, multiple npm packages in the @redhat-cloud-services scope were published with malicious versions. Each tarball ships a 4.1 MB obfuscated JavaScript file added to package.json as a preinstall hook. The hook runs a multi-stage loader that ends in a Bun-executed credential stealer hitting AWS, Azure, GCP, HashiCorp Vault, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions OIDC, npm, Bitwarden, and 1Password.

Version 2026.4.0 of the widely-used @bitwarden/cli npm package (78,000 weekly downloads) has been identified as malicious. The package contains a sophisticated multi-stage credential theft worm that explicitly names itself "Shai-Hulud: The Third Coming", a direct callback to previous Shai-Hulud supply chain campaigns, and targets developer credentials including SSH keys, cloud secrets, and even MCP configuration files.

On March 31, 2026, two malicious versions of axios were published to npm, , using credentials stolen from a lead axios maintainer. The attacker injected a hidden dependency into both releases that drops a remote access trojan (RAT) on any machine that ran npm install during the exposure window. No CVE identifier has been assigned at the time of writing. The malicious dependency executes automatically at install time via a postinstall hook, without any action by the developer.

On March 31, 2026, two malicious versions of axios, the enormously popular JavaScript HTTP client with over 100 million weekly downloads, were briefly published to npm via a compromised maintainer account. The packages contained a hidden dependency that deployed a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) to any machine that ran npm install (or equivalent in other package managers like Bun) during a two-hour window. The malicious versions (1.14.1 and 0.30.4) were removed from npm by 03:29 UTC.