A sophisticated phishing campaign has enabled attackers to compromise a maintainer account within the npm ecosystem, triggering one of the largest software-supply-chain breaches recorded. On 8 September 2025 the attacker gained access to the account of developer Josh Junon, and proceeded to publish malicious updates to widely used packages including“chalk” and“debug”. The versions laced with crypto-theft malware reached libraries that collectively recorded over 2 billion weekly downloads, intensifying concerns across the software-development community.

Investigation reveals the phishing attack was conducted via a spoofed email purporting to originate from npm support, urging the maintainer to reset two-factor authentication credentials. Upon entering valid details and a one-time token, the attacker gained full publishing rights and pushed poisoned package versions within a narrow window before removal. Once installed in users' environments, the malicious code hijacked cryptowallet transactions by intercepting browser APIs such as window. ethereum and replacing legitimate destination addresses with attacker-controlled wallets.

Security firms have since documented that the campaign did not stop at the initial 18-package wave. A worm-style variant was identified as able to self-propagate across additional packages, scanning developer machines for secrets, injecting GitHub Actions workflows and republishing compromised modules under new identifiers. More than 180 npm packages are now believed to harbour malicious payloads, escalating the incident from a targeted phishing hack into a broad ecosystem attack.

The high download count of the affected libraries means that millions of applications - from small-scale tools to enterprise services - could have been exposed transitively. Many organisations rely on third-party dependencies which in turn pull in the compromised modules, creating a chain reaction across vast development pipelines. Software-composition analysis and software bill of materials mechanisms have been flagged as vital, yet many teams remain ill-equipped to trace deep transitive dependencies or detect when malicious code has executed at runtime.

Developer behaviour emerges as a central weakness. Although npm enforces 2FA for high-profile maintainers, the social-engineering vector succeeded by mimicking official messages and exploiting human trust. The fact that such a high-profile maintainer could be compromised has triggered calls for stricter verification of credential resets, tighter controls over publishing tokens and more robust incident-response workflows.

In practical terms, affected organisations are urged to audit lockfiles for known malicious versions, clear build caches and artifact mirrors, blocklist compromised versions and deploy runtime detection of abnormal outbound wallet or API traffic. Organisations offering cloud‐based CI/CD services have already begun purge procedures and customer notifications.

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