Description

The Zapier NPM account has been compromised, enabling attackers to push malicious code into dozens of packages. The campaign has so far affected 425 packages and is estimated to cover ~132 million monthly downloads, making it one of the more severe recent supply-chain attacks The incident involves the introduction of the malware strain dubbed Shai Hulud via compromised packages originally published under the Zapier NPM namespace. The initial code drop is executed during installation via a script named setup_bun.js, which stages further components. After staging, the payload bun_environment.js is fetched or activated if available (or the environment is adapted) and executes across Windows, Linux and macOS by checking for the Bun runtime or installing it if absent. Once active, the malware exfiltrates secrets and credentials from infected hosts, then publishes them to newly created GitHub repositories named consistently with descriptions like “Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming”. The propagation pattern shows worm-like behaviour: the malware can use the compromised NPM packages to infect dependent packages transitively, increasing the blast radius. Interestingly, although the staging script was present in many packages, some lacked the full payload, indicating either mis-deployment by the attacker or a work-in-progress attack.?