We detected XCSSET malware inside a compromised Flutter package on pub.dev. Here is a full breakdown of the infection chain, propagation modules, and stealer logic we found inside. Category: Vulnerabilities & Threats
Executive Summary Since the release of our May 2026 report detailing adversarial misuse of artificial intelligence (AI), Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has observed forward leaning adversaries transition from basic prompting to agentic AI workflows and AI-enabled automation. In these operations, human-in-the-loop latency is dramatically reduced, compressing the traditional window for defenders to respond. In Q2 2026, GTIG observed threat actors compromise a cloud resource, then plan,…
A known Shai-Hulud worm payload sat dormant for 111 days, then republished to npm, right past the malware scanning meant to catch it. Category: Research
Four years after the Kaseya supply chain attack, a recent incident shows how threat actors still successfully target MSPs’ downstream customers through RMM software.
On August 28, starting at approximately 2000 UTC eight malicious versions of the @7nohe/openapi-react-query-codegen package were published on npm and were available for approximately three hours. These malicious versions were trojanized with an updated version of the miasma ma...
npm's min-release-age setting tells npm to ignore any package version published less than a set number of days ago, keeping freshly compromised releases out of npm install during the window when they do the most damage. Getting the setting onto developer workstations is straightforward. Knowing when someone quietly deletes it is a different problem entirely, and log-tailing inputs are no help because they only fire when lines are appended to a file. We built a ~40-line Common Expression…
On August 4, 2026, Elastic Security Labs identified a new Shai-Hulud campaign targeting the maintainer of keyv, a widely used key-value storage library. The attackers trojanized the monorepo and embedded a self-propagating worm called CHAINDROP that uses stolen npm credentials to automatically backdoor every other package the maintainer had publish rights to. The reach of this compromise is significant: keyv alone received over 600 million downloads last month, with related packages compounding…
On August 4, 2026, Elastic Security Labs identified a new Shai-Hulud campaign targeting the maintainer of keyv, a widely used key-value storage library. The attackers trojanized the monorepo and embedded a self-propagating worm called CHAINDROP that uses stolen npm credentials to automatically backdoor every other package the maintainer had publish rights to. The reach of this compromise is significant: keyv alone received over 600 million downloads last month, with related packages compounding…
In this article Attack chain overviewMitigation and protection guidanceIndicators of compromise (IOC)Microsoft Defender XDR detectionsAdvanced hunting queriesLearn more Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified a large-scale npm supply chain attack affecting more than 400 packages across multiple unrelated publishers, including packages associated with major enterprise software ecosystems such as keyv, flat-cache, cache-manager, and others. The malicious releases contain a Mini Shai-Hulud…
Elastic Security Labs found a new Contagious Interview campaign, tracked as REF9403, hiding malware inside SVG image files using steganography. To our knowledge, this specific infection chain has not been previously documented. We found it after the DPRK-aligned group targeted our own community Slack workspace with a fake job posting and a "coding challenge" project. Any user who ran the project ended up with a four-stage payload aligned with OTTERCOOKIE: a browser credential and crypto wallet…
ESET researchers have investigated an ongoing attack by the ScarCruft APT group that targets the Yanbian region via backdoor-laced Windows and Android games
TrendAI™ Research breaks down Quasar Linux (QLNX), a previously undocumented sophisticated Linux RAT with low detection rates. In this blog, we examine a full-featured Linux threat incorporating a rootkit, a PAM backdoor, credential harvesting, and more, revealing how this malware enables stealthy access, persistence, and potential supply-chain attacks.
Preamble In 2025 and 2026, we watched a pattern play out across the industry. Attackers stopped going after production servers directly and started targeting the automation that deploys to them. Compromised developer credentials, a modified workflow file, and suddenly every secret in a CI/CD environment is streaming to an attacker-controlled endpoint. We saw this play out across incidents involving major open-source projects, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure tooling. The…
Preamble Last Monday night I was working late and a Slack alert came in from a monitoring tool I had built three days earlier. Axios compromised; one of the most popular npm packages in the world. My heart started racing, I knew every second mattered to respond and limit the damage. But honestly it was so crazy that I thought it must be a false positive. I checked and rechecked everything a few times even though it seemed very obviously malicious. It wasn't a false positive. It was one of the…
Elastic Security Labs released initial triage and detection rules for the Axios supply-chain compromise. This is a detailed analysis of the RAT and payloads. Introduction Elastic Security Labs identified a supply chain compromise of the axios npm package, one of the most depended-upon packages in the JavaScript ecosystem with approximately 100 million weekly downloads. The attacker compromised a maintainer account and published backdoored versions that delivered a cross-platform Remote Access…
Elastic Security Labs is releasing an initial triage and detection rules for the Axios supply-chain compromise. We have released a detailed analysis on the Axios compromise RAT and payloads. Elastic Security Labs filed a GitHub Security Advisory to the axios repository on March 31, 2026 at 01:50 AM UTC to coordinate disclosure and ensure the maintainers and npm registry could act on the compromised versions. Introduction We are currently tracking a supply chain attack involving malicious Axios…
This blog discusses the steganography, cloud abuse, and email-based backdoors used against the Ukrainian defense supply chain in the latest Pawn Storm campaign that TrendAI™ Research observed and analyzed.
The BuddyBoss campaign (Parts 1 & 2) represents a full-spectrum software supply chain attack against the WordPress ecosystem, where the threat actor compromised the BuddyBoss plugin/theme distribution pipeline and leveraged it to infect hundreds of downstream websites. The ini...