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Cyber Risks · The Hacker News

Fake Web3 Accelerator Uses npm Packages to Spread Malware and Hijack AI Agent Traffic

Summary: Elastic Security Labs researchers documented an operation tracked as REF8801 that posed as a Web3 venture capital firm called Apex Accelerator and published malicious npm packages, @apexacc/cli and @apexacc/audit, which delivered information stealers and backdoors to Windows and macOS systems while promising free Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini credits, coding tools, and security audits. The packages, published by npm user "apexaccelerator" and linked to a GitHub account "apexaccs" and the Apex Foundation, also repackaged a legitimate coding agent to route model requests through attacker-controlled services, registered an attacker-controlled MCP server in the victim's agent configuration, and redirected OpenRouter LLM traffic; the researchers noted Russian-language comments in the commit history but said the clues are not sufficient to establish origin.

Why it matters: An attacker-controlled MCP server in your agent configuration can read prompts, conversation history, code snippets, and tool outputs, and can inject instructions and tool definitions that shape what the agent does next - visibility and influence over the agent itself, not just the endpoint.

Read the original at The Hacker News ↗

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Malware
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