Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In 2021, a critical vulnerability in a popular Node.js library allowed hackers to carry out code injection and silently compromise thousands of applications, with disastrous effects. It wasn’t a brute-force attack. It wasn’t ransomware. It was some wittily constructed pieces of malevolent code that got through defences and provided attackers with complete carte blanche. Code injection attacks are no longer rare. They’re alarmingly common.

Last night, our automated Aikido Intel system alerted us that potentially malicious code was detected in some packages within the @nx scope, which include packages with as many as ~6 million weekly downloads. The scope and impact of this breach are significant, as the attacker chose to publish the stolen data directly on GitHub, rather than sending it to their own servers. This means that there’s a SIGNIFICANT amount of credentials that are publicly available on GitHub.

On August 26–27, 2025 (UTC), eight malicious Nx and Nx Powerpack releases were pushed to npm across two version lines and were live for ~5 hours 20 minutes before removal. The attack also impacts the Nx Console VS Code extension.

Our security monitoring systems recently flagged a suspicious npm package, os-info-checker-es6, which represents a sophisticated and evolving threat within the npm ecosystem. What initially appeared as a simple OS information utility quickly unraveled into a sophisticated multi-stage malware attack. This campaign employs clever Unicode-based steganography to hide its initial malicious code and utilizes a Google Calendar event short link as a dynamic dropper for its final payload.

During an Advanced Continual Threat Hunt (ACTH) investigation conducted in early March 2025, Trustwave SpiderLabs identified a notable resurgence in malicious campaigns exploiting deceptive CAPTCHA verifications. These campaigns trick users into executing NodeJS-based backdoors, subsequently deploying sophisticated NodeJS Remote Access Trojans (RATs) similar to traditional PE structured legacy RATs.

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.

Hello from the Veracode Research blog! It’s been a minute since we’ve done a malware write-up, but we’re back and ready for action! And speaking of folks who are back and ready for action, the North Korean attackers behind the crypto wallet stealer campaign we wrote about in February of 2024 and again in May of 2024 are back at it with a new batch of malicious npm packages.

In a recent discovery, our research team uncovered a fake VS-code extension—truffelvscode—typosquatting the popular truffle for VS-code extension. This extension serves as a trojan horse for multi-stage malware. This blog takes a closer look at how the malicious extension operates, its obfuscation techniques, and IOCs related to this incident.