How is it possible that this code (line 9 of the index.js) isn't present in the source github repo, but can be seen in the beta feature of npmjs.com?
Also, the package 1.3.3 has been downloaded 0 times according to npmjs.com, how can the writer of this article has been able to detect this and not increment the download counter?
> How is it possible that this code (line 9 of the index.js) isn't present in the source github repo, but can be seen in the beta feature of npmjs.com
You may also be interested in npm package provenance [1] which lets you sign your npm published builds to prove it is built directly from the source being displayed.
This is something ALL projects should strive to setup, especially if they have a lot of dependent projects.
It looks like a lot of packages of the author have been compromised (in total over 1 billion downloads). I've updated the title an added information to the blog post.
- debug@4.4.2 (appears to have been yanked as of 8 Sep 18:09 CEST)
- chalk@5.6.1
- supports-color@10.2.1
- strip-ansi@7.1.1
- ansi-regex@6.2.1
- wrap-ansi@9.0.1
- color-convert@3.1.1
- color-name@2.0.1
- is-arrayish@0.3.3
- slice-ansi@7.1.1
- color@5.0.1
- color-string@2.1.1
- simple-swizzle@0.2.3
- supports-hyperlinks@4.1.1
- has-ansi@6.0.1
- chalk-template@1.1.1
- backslash@0.2.1
It looks and feels a bit like a targeted attack.
Will try to keep this comment updated as long as I can before the edit expires.
---
Chalk has been published over. The others remain compromised (8 Sep 17:50 CEST).
NPM has yet to get back to me. My NPM account is entirely unreachable; forgot password system does not work. I have no recourse right now but to wait.
Email came from support at npmjs dot help.
Looked legitimate at first glance. Not making excuses, just had a long week and a panicky morning and was just trying to knock something off my list of to-dos. Made the mistake of clicking the link instead of going directly to the site like I normally would (since I was mobile).
Just NPM is affected. Updates to be posted to the `/debug-js` link above.
I hate that kind of email when sent out legitimately. Google does this crap all the time pretty much conditioning their customers to click those links. And if you're really lucky it's from some subdomain they never bothered advertising as legit.
I'm sorry that you're having to go through this. Good luck sorting out your account access.
I actually got hit by something that sounds very similar back in July. I was saved by my DNS settings where "npNjs dot com" wound up on a blocklist. I might be paranoid, but it felt targeted and was of a higher level of believability than I'd seen before.
I also more recently received another email asking for an academic interview about "understanding why popular packages wouldn't have been published in a while" that felt like elicitation or an attempt to get publishing access.
Sadly both of the original emails are now deleted so I don't have the exact details anymore, but stay safe out there everyone.
Hey, no problem, man. You do a lot for the community, and it's not all your fault. We learn from our mistakes. I was thinking of having a public fake profile to avoid this type of attack, but I'm not sure how it would work on the git tracking capabilities. Probably keeo it only internally for you&NPM ( the real one ) and have some fake ones open for public but not sure, just an obfuscated idea.
Thanks for taking the responsibility and working in fixing ASAP. God bless you.
While it sucks that this happened, the good thing is that the ecosystem mobilized quickly. I think these sorts of incidents really show why package scanning is essential for securing open source package repositories.
Thank you for the swift and candid response, this has to suck. :/
> The author appears to have deleted most of the compromised package before losing access to his account. At the time of writing, the package simple-swizzle is still compromised.
Is this quote from TFA incorrect, since npm hasn’t yanked anything yet?
mistakes happen. owning them doesn't always happen, so well done.
phishing is too easy. so easy that I don't think the completely unchecked growth of ecosystems like NPM can continue. metastasis is not healthy. there are too many maintainers writing too many packages that too many others rely on.
man. anyone and everyone can get fished in a targeted attack. good luck on the cleanup and thanks for being forward about it.
want to stress everyone it can happen to. no one has perfect opsec or tradecraft as a 1 man show. its simply not possible. only luck gets one through and that often enough runs out.
Tbh, it's not your fault per se; everybody can fall for phishing emails. The issue, IMO, lies with npmjs which publishes to everyone all at the same time. A delayed publish that allows parties like Aikido and co to scan for suspicious package uploads first (e.g. big changes in patch releases, obfuscated code, code that intercepts HTTP calls, etc), and a direct flagging system at NPM and / or Github would already be an improvement.
maybe you should work with feross to make a website-api that simply gives you a "true/false" on "can I safely update my dependencies right now" that gives an outofband way to mark the current or all versions thereof, of compromised packages.
Hey, you're doing an exemplary response, transparent and fast, in what must be a very stressful situation!
I figure you aren't about to get fooled by phishing anytime soon, but based on some of your remarks and remarks of others, a PSA:
TRUSTING YOUR OWN SENSES to "check" that a domain is right, or an email is right, or the wording has some urgency or whatever is BOUND TO FAIL often enough.
I don't understand how most of the anti-phishing advice focuses on that, it's useless to borderline counter-productive.
What really helps against phishing :
1. NEVER EVER login from an email link. EVER. There are enough legit and phishing emails asking you to do this that it's basically impossible to tell one from the other. The only way to win is to not try.
2. U2F/Webauthn key as second factor is phishing-proof. TOTP is not.
That is all there is. Any other method, any other "indicator" helps but is error-prone, which means someone somewhere will get phished eventually. Particularly if stressed, tired, or in a hurry. It just happened to be you this time.
The fact that NPMs entire ecosystem relies on this not happening regularly is very scary.
I’m extremely security conscious and that phishing email could have easily gotten me. All it takes is one slip up. Tired, stressed, distracted. Bokm, compromised
I am not very sophisticated npm user on MacOS, but I installed bunch of packages for Claude Code development. How do we check if computer has a problem?
Do we just run:
npm list -g #for global installs
npm list #for local installs
And check if any packages appear that are on the above list?
Thanks for leaving a transparent response with what happened, how you responded, what you're doing next, and concisely taking accountability Great work!
Hey, new dev here. Sorry if this is a common knowledge and I am asking a stupid question. How does you getting phished affect these NPM packages? aren't these handled by NPM or the developers of them?
> Yes, I've been pwned. First time for everything, I suppose. It was a 2FA reset email that looked shockingly authentic. I should have paid better attention, but it slipped past me. Sincerely sorry, this is embarrassing.
My worst nightmare is to wake up, see an email like that and hastily try to recover it while still 90% asleep, compromising my account in the process.
However, I think I can still sleep safe considering I'm using a password manager that only shows up when I'm on the right domain. A 2FA phishing email sending me to some unknown domain wouldn't show my password manager on the site, and would hence give me a moment to consider what's happening. I'm wondering if the author here wasn't using any sort of password manager, or something slipped through anyways?
Regardless, fucking sucks to end up there, at least it ends up being a learned lesson for more than just one person, hopefully. I sure get more careful every time it happens in the ecosystem.
This is terrifying. Reminder to store your crypto in a hardware based wallet like Ledger not browser based. Stay frosty when making transfers from exchanges.
@junon, if it makes you feel any better, I once had a Chinese hacking group target my router and hijack my DNS configuration specifically to make "amazon.com" point to 1:1 replica of the site just to steal my Amazon credentials.
There was no way to quickly visualize that the site was fake, because it was in fact, "actually" amazon.com.
Phishing sucks. Sorry to read about this.
Edit: To other readers, yes, the exploit failed to use an additional TLS attack, which was how I noticed something was wrong. Otherwise, the site was identical. This was many years ago before browsers were as vocal as they are now about unsecured connections.
As an outsider to the npm ecosystem, reading this list of packages is astonishing. Why do js people import someone else's npm module for every little trivial thing?
I can provide you with some missing background as I was a prior full time JavaScript/TypeScript developer for 15 years.
Most people writing JavaScript code for employment cannot really program. It is not a result of intellectual impairment, but appears to be more a training and cultural deficit in the work force. The result is extreme anxiety at the mere idea of writing original code, even when trivial in size and scope. The responses vary but often take the form of reused cliches of which some don't even directly apply.
What's weird about this is that it is mostly limited to the employed workforce. Developers who are self-taught or spend as much time writing personal code on side projects don't have this anxiety. This is weird because the resulting hobby projects tend to be substantially more durable than products funded by employment that are otherwise better tested by paid QA staff.
As a proof ask any JavaScript team at your employment to build their next project without a large framework and just observe how they respond both verbally and non-verbally.
Given that most of these kind of attacks are detected relatively quickly, NPM should implement a feature where it doesn't install/upgrade packages newer than 3 days, and just use the previous version.
Developer account got hijacked through phishing. @junon acknowledged this readily and is trying to get it sorted. Meanwhile, this is a mistake that can happen to anyone, especially under pressure. So no point in discussing the personal oversight.
So let me raise a different concern. This looks like an exploit for web browsers, where an average user (and most above average users) have no clue as to what's running underneath. And cryptocurrency and web3 aren't the only sensitive information that browsers handle. Meaning that similar exploits could arise targeting any of those. With millions of developers, someone is bound to repeat the same mistake sooner or later. And with some packages downloaded thousands of times per day, some CI/CD system will pull it in and publish it in production. This is a bigger problem than just a developer's oversight.
- How do the end user protect themselves at this point? Especially the average user?
- How do you prevent supply chain compromises like this?
- What about other language registries?
- What about other platforms? (binaries, JVM, etc?)
This isn't a rhetorical question. Please discuss the solutions that you use or are aware of.
One thing I've been thinking of is to restrict global access to packages. Something like ansi-styles doesn't need access to the crypto global, or to the DOM, or make web requests, etc. So if you can sandbox individual libraries, you can decrease the attack surface a lot.
You could imagine that a compromised pad-left package could read the contents of all password inputs on the page and send it to an attacker server, but if you don't let that package access the document, or send web requests, you can avoid this compromise.
Luckily this seems to be browser-specific, and not cryptocurrency malware that runs in Node.js environments, so it might be wise for us all to do some hardening on our software, and make sure we're doing things like version pinning.
Edit: As of this morning, `npm audit` will catch this.
One of the most insidious parts of this malware's payload, which isn't getting enough attention, is how it chooses the replacement wallet address. It doesn't just pick one at random from its list.
It actually calculates the Levenshtein distance between the legitimate address and every address in its own list. It then selects the attacker's address that is visually most similar to the original one.
This is a brilliant piece of social engineering baked right into the code. It's designed to specifically defeat the common security habit of only checking the first and last few characters of an address before confirming a transaction.
I'm a little confused on one of the excerpts from your article.
> Our package-lock.json specified the stable version 1.3.2 or newer, so it installed the latest version 1.3.3
As far as I've always understood, the lockfile always specifies one single, locked version for each dependency, and even provides the URL to the tarball of that version. You can define "x version or newer" in the package.json file, but if it updates to a new patch version it's updating the lockfile with it. The npm docs suggest this is the case as well: https://arc.net/l/quote/cdigautx
And with that, packages usually shouldn't be getting updated in your CI pipeline.
Am I mistaken on how npm(/yarn/pnpm) lockfiles work?
We should be displaying hashes in a color scheme determined by the hash (foreground/background colors for each character determined by a hash of the hash, salted by that character's index, adjusted to ensure sufficient contrast).
That way it's much harder to make one hash look like another.
I have nothing to do with this but still I am getting second hand embarrassment. Here is an example, is-arrayish package, 73.8 MILLION downloads per week. The code? 3 lines to check if an object can be used like an array.
I am sorry, but this is not due to not having a good standard library, this is just bad programming. Just pure laziness. At this point just blacklist every package starting with is-.
On one extreme, we have standards committees that move glacially, and on the other, we have a chaotic package ecosystem moving faster than is prudent. The two are related.
You don’t get it. People don’t add “is-arrayish” directly as a dependency. It goes like this:
1) N tiny dubious modules like that are created by maintainers (like Qix)
2) The maintainer then creates 1 super useful non-tiny module that imports those N dubious modules.
3) Normal devs add that super useful module as a dependency… and ofc, they end up with countless dubious transitive dependencies
Why maintainers do that? I don’t think it’s ignorance or laziness or lack of knowledge about good software engineering. It’s because either ego (“I’m the maintainer of N packages with millions of downloads” sounds better than “I’m the maintainer of 1 package “), or because they get more donations or because they are actually planning to drop malware some time soon.
I wrote it 10 years ago, I think before Node was v1, and forgot about it for a long time. This was back before we had spreads, classes, typescript, and had to use DOM arrays and other weird structures, and where `arguments` wasn't an array but an object.
That page says that the affected versions are ">=0". Does that seem right? That page also says:
> Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.
I thought it stupid that there were some old established electro-mechanical manufacturing companies that would just block github.com and Internet downloads in general, only allowing codes from internal repos that took months to get approved, breaking npm dependent workflows.
Now? Why aren't everyone setting up own GitHub mirrors is beyond me, almost. They were 100% right.
This is really scary. It could have totally happened to me too. How can we design security which works even when people are tired or stressed?
Once upon a time, I used a software called passwordmaker. Essentially, it computed a password like hash(domain+username+master password). Genius idea, but it was a nightmare to use. Why? Because amazon.se and amazon.com share the same username/password database. Similarly, the "domain" for Amazon's app was "com.amazon.something".
Perhaps it's time for browser vendors to strongly bind credentials to the domain, the whole domain and nothing but the domain, so help me Codd.
154 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadAlso, the package 1.3.3 has been downloaded 0 times according to npmjs.com, how can the writer of this article has been able to detect this and not increment the download counter?
You may also be interested in npm package provenance [1] which lets you sign your npm published builds to prove it is built directly from the source being displayed.
This is something ALL projects should strive to setup, especially if they have a lot of dependent projects.
1: https://github.blog/security/supply-chain-security/introduci...
Another good read is at https://www.aikido.dev/blog/npm-debug-and-chalk-packages-com...
More info:
- https://github.com/chalk/chalk/issues/656
- https://github.com/debug-js/debug/issues/1005#issuecomment-3...
Affected packages (at least the ones I know of):
- ansi-styles@6.2.2
- debug@4.4.2 (appears to have been yanked as of 8 Sep 18:09 CEST)
- chalk@5.6.1
- supports-color@10.2.1
- strip-ansi@7.1.1
- ansi-regex@6.2.1
- wrap-ansi@9.0.1
- color-convert@3.1.1
- color-name@2.0.1
- is-arrayish@0.3.3
- slice-ansi@7.1.1
- color@5.0.1
- color-string@2.1.1
- simple-swizzle@0.2.3
- supports-hyperlinks@4.1.1
- has-ansi@6.0.1
- chalk-template@1.1.1
- backslash@0.2.1
It looks and feels a bit like a targeted attack.
Will try to keep this comment updated as long as I can before the edit expires.
---
Chalk has been published over. The others remain compromised (8 Sep 17:50 CEST).
NPM has yet to get back to me. My NPM account is entirely unreachable; forgot password system does not work. I have no recourse right now but to wait.
Email came from support at npmjs dot help.
Looked legitimate at first glance. Not making excuses, just had a long week and a panicky morning and was just trying to knock something off my list of to-dos. Made the mistake of clicking the link instead of going directly to the site like I normally would (since I was mobile).
Just NPM is affected. Updates to be posted to the `/debug-js` link above.
Again, I'm so sorry.
Great of you to own up to it.
I actually got hit by something that sounds very similar back in July. I was saved by my DNS settings where "npNjs dot com" wound up on a blocklist. I might be paranoid, but it felt targeted and was of a higher level of believability than I'd seen before.
I also more recently received another email asking for an academic interview about "understanding why popular packages wouldn't have been published in a while" that felt like elicitation or an attempt to get publishing access.
Sadly both of the original emails are now deleted so I don't have the exact details anymore, but stay safe out there everyone.
Please take care and see this as things that happen and not your own personal failure.
https://socket.dev/blog/npm-author-qix-compromised-in-major-...
While it sucks that this happened, the good thing is that the ecosystem mobilized quickly. I think these sorts of incidents really show why package scanning is essential for securing open source package repositories.
> The author appears to have deleted most of the compromised package before losing access to his account. At the time of writing, the package simple-swizzle is still compromised.
Is this quote from TFA incorrect, since npm hasn’t yanked anything yet?
phishing is too easy. so easy that I don't think the completely unchecked growth of ecosystems like NPM can continue. metastasis is not healthy. there are too many maintainers writing too many packages that too many others rely on.
want to stress everyone it can happen to. no one has perfect opsec or tradecraft as a 1 man show. its simply not possible. only luck gets one through and that often enough runs out.
Does anyone know how this attack works? Is it a CSRF against npmjs.com?
I figure you aren't about to get fooled by phishing anytime soon, but based on some of your remarks and remarks of others, a PSA:
TRUSTING YOUR OWN SENSES to "check" that a domain is right, or an email is right, or the wording has some urgency or whatever is BOUND TO FAIL often enough.
I don't understand how most of the anti-phishing advice focuses on that, it's useless to borderline counter-productive.
What really helps against phishing :
1. NEVER EVER login from an email link. EVER. There are enough legit and phishing emails asking you to do this that it's basically impossible to tell one from the other. The only way to win is to not try.
2. U2F/Webauthn key as second factor is phishing-proof. TOTP is not.
That is all there is. Any other method, any other "indicator" helps but is error-prone, which means someone somewhere will get phished eventually. Particularly if stressed, tired, or in a hurry. It just happened to be you this time.
Good luck and well done again on the response!
Login using one off email links (instead of username + password) is increasingly common which means its the only option.
I’m extremely security conscious and that phishing email could have easily gotten me. All it takes is one slip up. Tired, stressed, distracted. Bokm, compromised
Do we just run:
npm list -g #for global installs
npm list #for local installs
And check if any packages appear that are on the above list?
Thanks!
Folks from multi-billion dollar companies with multimillion dollar packages should learn a few things from this response.
thanks for your efforts!
My worst nightmare is to wake up, see an email like that and hastily try to recover it while still 90% asleep, compromising my account in the process.
However, I think I can still sleep safe considering I'm using a password manager that only shows up when I'm on the right domain. A 2FA phishing email sending me to some unknown domain wouldn't show my password manager on the site, and would hence give me a moment to consider what's happening. I'm wondering if the author here wasn't using any sort of password manager, or something slipped through anyways?
Regardless, fucking sucks to end up there, at least it ends up being a learned lesson for more than just one person, hopefully. I sure get more careful every time it happens in the ecosystem.
There was no way to quickly visualize that the site was fake, because it was in fact, "actually" amazon.com.
Phishing sucks. Sorry to read about this.
Edit: To other readers, yes, the exploit failed to use an additional TLS attack, which was how I noticed something was wrong. Otherwise, the site was identical. This was many years ago before browsers were as vocal as they are now about unsecured connections.
Why do "Java people" depend on lowrie's itext? Remember the leftpad-esque incident he initiated in 2015?
Most people writing JavaScript code for employment cannot really program. It is not a result of intellectual impairment, but appears to be more a training and cultural deficit in the work force. The result is extreme anxiety at the mere idea of writing original code, even when trivial in size and scope. The responses vary but often take the form of reused cliches of which some don't even directly apply.
What's weird about this is that it is mostly limited to the employed workforce. Developers who are self-taught or spend as much time writing personal code on side projects don't have this anxiety. This is weird because the resulting hobby projects tend to be substantially more durable than products funded by employment that are otherwise better tested by paid QA staff.
As a proof ask any JavaScript team at your employment to build their next project without a large framework and just observe how they respond both verbally and non-verbally.
The rust docs, a static site generator, pull in over 700 packages.
Because it’s trivial and easy
Another one for “web3 is going great”…
Was caught quickly (hours? hard to be sure, the versions have been removed/overwritten).
Attacker owns npmjs.help domain.
the actual code only runs in a browser context - it replaces all crypto addresses in many places with the attacker's.
a list of the attacker's wallet addresses: https://gist.github.com/sindresorhus/2b7466b1ec36376b8742dc7...
Mempool.space - no Blockchair - no Tronscan - no Blockcypher.com - no Blockread.io - no
So let me raise a different concern. This looks like an exploit for web browsers, where an average user (and most above average users) have no clue as to what's running underneath. And cryptocurrency and web3 aren't the only sensitive information that browsers handle. Meaning that similar exploits could arise targeting any of those. With millions of developers, someone is bound to repeat the same mistake sooner or later. And with some packages downloaded thousands of times per day, some CI/CD system will pull it in and publish it in production. This is a bigger problem than just a developer's oversight.
- How do the end user protect themselves at this point? Especially the average user?
- How do you prevent supply chain compromises like this?
- What about other language registries?
- What about other platforms? (binaries, JVM, etc?)
This isn't a rhetorical question. Please discuss the solutions that you use or are aware of.
You could imagine that a compromised pad-left package could read the contents of all password inputs on the page and send it to an attacker server, but if you don't let that package access the document, or send web requests, you can avoid this compromise.
- Install as little software as possible, use websites if possible.
- Keep important stuff (especially cryptocurrency) on a separate device.
- If you are working on a project that pulls 100s of dependencies from a package registry, put that project on a VM or container.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/martypitt/0d50c350aa7f0fc73354754343...
Edit: As of this morning, `npm audit` will catch this.
It actually calculates the Levenshtein distance between the legitimate address and every address in its own list. It then selects the attacker's address that is visually most similar to the original one.
This is a brilliant piece of social engineering baked right into the code. It's designed to specifically defeat the common security habit of only checking the first and last few characters of an address before confirming a transaction.
We did a full deobfuscation of the payload and analyzed this specific function. Wrote up the details here for anyone interested: https://jdstaerk.substack.com/p/we-just-found-malicious-code...
Stay safe!
> Our package-lock.json specified the stable version 1.3.2 or newer, so it installed the latest version 1.3.3
As far as I've always understood, the lockfile always specifies one single, locked version for each dependency, and even provides the URL to the tarball of that version. You can define "x version or newer" in the package.json file, but if it updates to a new patch version it's updating the lockfile with it. The npm docs suggest this is the case as well: https://arc.net/l/quote/cdigautx
And with that, packages usually shouldn't be getting updated in your CI pipeline.
Am I mistaken on how npm(/yarn/pnpm) lockfiles work?
That way it's much harder to make one hash look like another.
I am sorry, but this is not due to not having a good standard library, this is just bad programming. Just pure laziness. At this point just blacklist every package starting with is-.
On one extreme, we have standards committees that move glacially, and on the other, we have a chaotic package ecosystem moving faster than is prudent. The two are related.
1) N tiny dubious modules like that are created by maintainers (like Qix)
2) The maintainer then creates 1 super useful non-tiny module that imports those N dubious modules.
3) Normal devs add that super useful module as a dependency… and ofc, they end up with countless dubious transitive dependencies
Why maintainers do that? I don’t think it’s ignorance or laziness or lack of knowledge about good software engineering. It’s because either ego (“I’m the maintainer of N packages with millions of downloads” sounds better than “I’m the maintainer of 1 package “), or because they get more donations or because they are actually planning to drop malware some time soon.
They personally buy into modularization, do-one-thing-do-it-well. Also engineering is fun, and engineering more things is more fun.
Kudos to you for owning up to it.
As others have said, it's the kind of thing that could happen to anyone, unfortunately.
Got it from the "simple-swizzle" package that hasn't been taken down by NPM.
That page says that the affected versions are ">=0". Does that seem right? That page also says:
> Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.
Is this information accurate?
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-hfm8-9jrf-7g9w
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-5g7q-qh7p-jjvm
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-8mgj-vmr8-frr6
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-m99c-cfww-cxqx
I wonder if they're all from the same thing, they all popped up at the same time.
edit: they do appear to all be the same thing, and the advisory version wildcard is wrong: https://github.com/github/advisory-database/issues/6099
Now? Why aren't everyone setting up own GitHub mirrors is beyond me, almost. They were 100% right.
Once upon a time, I used a software called passwordmaker. Essentially, it computed a password like hash(domain+username+master password). Genius idea, but it was a nightmare to use. Why? Because amazon.se and amazon.com share the same username/password database. Similarly, the "domain" for Amazon's app was "com.amazon.something".
Perhaps it's time for browser vendors to strongly bind credentials to the domain, the whole domain and nothing but the domain, so help me Codd.