"Shai-Hulud" Worm Compromises npm Ecosystem in Supply Chain Attack (Updated November 26)
Summary: Unit 42 investigated a renewed npm-focused campaign dubbed Shai-Hulud 2.0, first reported in early November 2025, affecting tens of thousands of GitHub repositories including over 25,000 malicious repositories across about 350 unique users. The worm targets the pre-install phase of software dependencies, harvests credentials such as npm tokens and SSH keys, publishes stolen secrets to a public GitHub repository named "Shai-Hulud" under the victim's account, and uses stolen npm tokens to inject malicious code into other packages maintained by the same developer.
What's compelling: The campaign reached the widely used @ctrl/tinycolor library, which receives millions of weekly downloads, and stolen credentials can lead directly to cloud compromise, data theft from storage buckets, ransomware, or deletion of production environments. Because the worm propagates at the speed of CI/CD using maintainers' existing publishing rights, malicious versions can enter builds without a CVE to warn you.
Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗
- Topics
- Supply Chain & AppSec
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