• Multiple redhat-cloud-services npm packages compromised (StepSecurity B

    From LWN.net@618:250/24 to All on Tue Jun 2 06:40:09 2026

    StepSecurity is reporting
    that a number of npm packages in the @redhat-cloud-services
    scope include malware that runs automatically on every npm
    install:

    The payload is a multi-stage credential harvester that sweeps
    GitHub Actions secrets along with AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes,
    HashiCorp Vault, npm, and CircleCI tokens, and it is purpose-built to
    evade detection, including an explicit attempt to bypass StepSecurity Harden-Runner.

    StepSecurity analyzed @redhat-cloud-services/host-inventory-client@5.0.3 in full. Its
    index.js, executed at install time, is 4.2 MB, a file that should
    weigh a few kilobytes, with the real payload buried under three
    separate layers of obfuscation. The malware is also a self-propagating
    worm: using stolen npm tokens and npm's bypass_2fa parameter, it
    republishes backdoored versions of other packages on its own, even
    against accounts protected by two-factor authentication, so every
    infected machine can seed the next wave with no attacker
    involvement. All affected packages were published via GitHub Actions
    OIDC from the RedHatInsights/javascript-clients repository, indicating
    the upstream CI/CD pipeline itself was compromised. Analysis of the
    remaining packages is ongoing.

    A blog
    post from SafeDep has additional analysis about the incident. We did not find an advisory from Red Hat on this yet.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1075742/
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