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Malware in PostHog NPM packages

11 points by roskoalexey ↗ HN
I know many of us use a really excellent PostHog service, but it seems their latest version of `posthog-js` NPM package contains malware.

Reported to their security channel, also reported to NPM, but also wanted to raise awareness here.

Update: It seems all their NPM packages have the same problem

Update 2: https://status.posthog.com/

10 comments

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roskoalexey
Details:

In `package.json`, it has a script `"preinstall": "node setup_bun.js"` + files `setup_bun.js` and `bun_environment.js` which are apparently is the malware.

rvz
This feels like an impending disaster about to be unraveled in lots of npm packages.

Looking forward to the post-mortem.

roskoalexey
Some more details:

1. Malware uses a "preinstall" NPM script, which is triggered upon you running `npm install`.

2. Malware installs `bun`.

3. Then it installs and starts `trufflehog` (a tool for scanning code for secrets, API keys, passwords, etc.).

nextaccountic
One more reason to run pnpm. Or better yet, deno
sakce
Thank you for flagging this - we are actively working on it and will be back with an update!
timgl
co-founder of PostHog here. It looks like we were also a victim of this attack: https://helixguard.ai/blog/malicious-sha1hulud-2025-11-24

We've rotated keys and passwords, unpublished all affected packages and have pushed new versions, so make sure you're on the latest version of our SDKs.

We're still figuring out how this key got compromised, and we'll follow up with a post-mortem. We'll update status.posthog.com with more updates as well.