Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a fresh software supply chain attack campaign that has compromised various npm packages associated with the @antv ecosystem as part of the ongoing Mini Shai-Hulud attack wave.
“The attack affects packages tied to the npm maintainer account atool, including echarts-for-react, a widely used React wrapper for Apache ECharts with roughly 1.1 million weekly downloads,” Socket said.
The list of affected packages include @antv packages such as @antv/g2, @antv/g6, @antv/x6, @antv/l7, @antv/s2, @antv/f2, @antv/g, @antv/g2plot, @antv/graphin, and @antv/data-set, as well as related packages outside the @antv namespace, including echarts-for-react, timeago.js, size-sensor, canvas-nest.js, and others.
The application security company said the tradecraft matches Mini Shai-Hulud, where a compromised maintainer account is leveraged to push out trojanized versions in quick succession.
The development comes as the supply chain attack campaign continues to slither its way through the software supply chain, worming through different open-source registries rapidly and infecting hundreds of software packages by embedding credential-stealing code into popular development tools.
“The potential blast radius is significant because the affected publishing account is connected to widely used packages across data visualization, graphing, mapping, charting, and React component ecosystems,” Socket said. “Even if only a subset of those packages received malicious updates, the popularity of the package ecosystem creates meaningful downstream exposure for organizations that automatically pull new dependency versions.”
The attacker is said to have published 639 malicious versions across 323 unique packages, including 558 versions across 279 unique @antv packages. The stealer payload harvests more than 20 credential types, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, GitHub, npm, SSH, Kubernetes, Vault, Stripe, database connection strings, and attempts Docker container escape via the host socket. The stealer is identical to the Mini Shai-Hulud payload used in the SAP compromise.
The collected data is eventually serialized, compressed, encrypted, and exfiltrated to a threat actor-controlled domain (“t.m-kosche[.]com:443”) and to “filev2.getsession[.]org/file/” via the Session P2P network. As a fallback mechanism, the malware leverages the stolen GitHub token to create a public repository under the victim’s account and commit the data in a JSON file.
The repositories feature the description “niagA oG eW ereH :duluH-iahS,” which reverses to “Shai-Hulud: Here We Go Again.” As of writing, there are more than 2,500 repositories in GitHub containing this marker.
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| Shai-Hulud Framework |
“These repositories are created using GitHub tokens stolen from compromised CI/CD environments,” StepSecurity said. “The sheer volume, over two thousand repositories, provides a lower bound on the number of unique environments whose credentials were successfully exfiltrated. If your GitHub token was among those stolen, the attacker has used it to create at least one of these repositories under an account they control.”
Furthermore, the malware incorporates an npm propagation logic that abuses the stolen npm tokens to first validate them through the npm registry API, enumerates packages maintained by the token owner, downloads package tarballs, injects the malicious payload, adds a preinstall hook, increases the package versions, and republishes them using the compromised maintainer’s identity.
“The attack uses two execution paths,” SafeDep said. “Each compromised version adds a preinstall hook (bun run index.js). 630 of the 637 malicious versions also inject an optionalDependencies entry [pointing to imposter commits] that delivers a second copy of the payload via the legitimate antvis/G2 GitHub repository.”
“The 22-minute publish burst across 317 packages (637 versions), with an identical obfuscated payload, rules out a gradual or targeted operation. This was automated, rapid exfiltration using a stolen token.”
Another noteworthy feature introduced in the latest version of the payload is a Sigstore attestation pipeline, allowing the attacker to sign artifacts with legitimate Sigstore certificates when running in CI environments using a newly minted OIDC token. The Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) provenance forgery renders a legitimate release indistinguishable from a malicious version.
“The certificate subject reflects the identity of the CI runner whose OIDC token the worm minted, a legitimate identity that did not authorize the publish,” Endor Labs said. “The attestation proves where the package was built. It does not prove the build was authorized.”
Additional analyses into the incident have been published by various security vendors –
The self-replicating Mini Shai-Hulud campaign is assessed to be the work of a financially motivated threat actor named TeamPCP. However, as of last week, the activity has entered an aggressive, new phase after TeamPCP released the entire source code for other threat actors to use as part of a supply chain attack contest announced in partnership with BreachForums.
“The open-sourcing of a production offensive framework is not unprecedented, but it’s unusual for an active campaign,” Datadog said. “It lowers the barrier for other actors to adopt TeamPCP’s playbook including the more sophisticated techniques like OIDC token abuse, provenance forgery, and AI tool persistence hooks.”
Since then, an unknown threat actor has uploaded four malicious npm packages, one of which contains a near-verbatim copy of the Shai-Hulud worm with its own command-and-control infrastructure, an indication that cloned versions of the worm may infest open-source ecosystems.
This copycat wave, in turn, complicates attribution efforts, while the attacks continue to facilitate credential theft and open the door for follow-on exploitation. The incident once again demonstrates how compromising tools that are already trusted inside enterprise networks can be abused as delivery vehicles for malware. What makes the campaign truly dangerous is that one compromise feeds into the next, resulting in an ever-expanding blast radius as more packages are hacked.
“This campaign is built for credential theft at scale,” Trend Micro said in a report last week. “Organizations using GitHub Actions, PyPI, Docker Hub, GHCR [GitHub Container Registry], VS Code extensions, and cloud-connected CI runners are directly exposed to this risk.”
Users who have installed the poisoned versions are recommended to rotate their credentials, enable two-factor authentication (2FA), audit GitHub for the Shai-Hulud-related strings, and switch to a safe version.
“If it wasn’t clear already, TeamPCP is here to stay, and npm malware isn’t going anywhere without a proper re-review of their registry’s security,” OX Security said. “Following their competition for the largest supply chain on BreachForums and the spreading of their own source code, it seems that the group is going to continue exploiting the package dependencies and CI/CD actions to ultimately infect millions of machines and steal information and crypto currency.”
