Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Container security starts with your base image. But here’s the catch: In this post, we’ll explore why updating base images is harder than it seems, walk through real examples, and show how you can automate safe, intelligent upgrades without breaking your app.

On 5 May, 16:00 GMT+0, our automated malware analysis pipeline detected a suspicious package released, rand-user-agent@1.0.110. It detected unusual code in the package, and it wasn’t wrong. It detected signs of a supply chain attack against this legitimate package, which has about ~45.000 weekly downloads.

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.

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.

The tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action, which is currently used in over 23,000 repositories, has been compromised, leaking secrets through workflow logs and impacting thousands of CI pipelines. All tagged versions were modified, making tag-based pinning unsafe. Public repositories are at the highest risk, but private repos should also verify their exposure.

You want to know the real answer to two questions about Docker security.

You’ve heard about JavaScript SQL injection attacks before, but you’re not entirely sure what they look like in the wild or if you need to worry about them in the first place. Maybe you’re trying to figure out just how bad it could be. In short, if you’re building apps using SQL databases, like MySQL and PostgreSQL, you’re at risk—you’re not safe from attack methods plaguing developers and their databases for decades.