Nearly 800 Malicious npm Packages Deliver Cross-Platform RAT and Infostealer - The Hacker News

A cluster of nearly 800 malicious packages has been published to the npm registry as part of a new campaign designed to deliver cross-platform malware targeting Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

"These packages appear to use AI slop squatted, or randomly generated typo-squatting package names, but all of them deliver a powerful RAT and infostealer payload," OpenSourceMalware researcher Paul McCarty said.

Unlike other npm-oriented software supply chain attacks that make use of lifecycle hooks like preinstall or postinstall to trigger the execution of malicious code, the newly identified packages come with a README that instructs developers to load them with require(), a built-in function to import modules, local files, and third-party packages.

The attack leads to the execution of a downloader named WEL1DROPPER, which, when executed, identifies the host operating system and processor architecture and fetches a compatible payload from one of the three Cloudflare Workers hosts. The three Cloudflare Workers domains are listed below -