npm
Safeguard articles tagged "npm" — guides, analysis, and best practices for software supply chain and application security.
100 articles
Seventeen Fake Payment SDKs, Six Minutes to Detection, and a Sandbox Check
On 7 July 2026, roughly 17 typosquatted payment-provider packages hit npm and PyPI — paysafe-checkout, paysafe-node, neteller and friends. They swept environment variables matching KEY, SECRET, TOKEN, PASS, AUTH and API, explicitly hunted AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, GITHUB_TOKEN and NPM_TOKEN, and exited quietly if they thought they were in a sandbox.
npm v12 Disabled Install Scripts. Attackers Adapted in Three Days.
On 8 July 2026 npm v12 shipped with install scripts off by default — closing what GitHub called the ecosystem's largest code-execution surface. By 11 July, the jscrambler payload was executing on import instead. A study in why one-vector mitigations buy days, not years.
The Jscrambler npm Compromise Went After Your AI Coding Assistant's Credentials
On 11 July 2026, five versions of the jscrambler package plus its webpack, gulp, grunt and metro plugins shipped malicious native binaries. The payload targeted crypto wallets and the credential stores of Claude Desktop, Cursor and Windsurf — and later versions fired on import, not install, defeating --ignore-scripts.
npm Provenance: Adoption Tracking in Late 2025
Two and a half years after npm provenance launched, adoption is climbing but uneven. Here is the late-2025 picture across the top packages and frameworks.
The postmark-mcp Backdoor: What MCP Server Vetting Should Look Like
A trojanized MCP server BCC'd every email it sent to an attacker for weeks, downloaded 1,643 times, before anyone noticed. Here's the pattern and the fix.
The Nx Attack Turned AI Coding Agents Into the Malware
In August 2025, attackers hijacked Nx's npm publish token and used Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Amazon Q as the exfiltration engine — leaking 2,349 secrets.
Protestware: what colors.js and faker.js taught the industry about maintainer risk
One unpaid maintainer sabotaged two packages with 20M+ weekly downloads in a single week. Here's what colors.js and faker.js reveal about single-maintainer risk.
npm package aliasing: the dependency confusion attack surface most teams never scan
npm's alias@npm:target syntax lets an attacker capture a name that doesn't even exist yet on the registry — widening dependency confusion past simple squatting.
Typosquatting and dependency confusion: a defense guide
In 2021 one researcher got code execution inside 35+ companies for $130,000+ in bounties — without exploiting a single vulnerability. Here's how to close the gap.
Anatomy of a malicious npm package attack
One phished maintainer, 18 packages, and billions of weekly downloads — how npm/PyPI supply chain attacks actually unfold, and the signals that expose them.
The faker.js and colors.js Sabotage: What Maintainer-Driven Risk Teaches About Pinning
In January 2022 a trusted maintainer bricked two npm packages with a combined 26M+ weekly downloads — from his own account, with valid credentials.
Dependency confusion on npm: how public-registry precedence became a delivery channel for post-exploitation frameworks
In May 2022, Snyk found 200+ malicious npm packages, including one that polled for commands until it dropped a Cobalt Strike trojan, and another that delayed 30 minutes to dodge sandboxes.
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