Microsoft spots malicious npm package stealing data from UNIX systems
The security team at npm (Node Package Manager), the de-facto package manager for the JavaScript ecosystem, has taken down today a malicious package that was caught stealing sensitive information from UNIX systems. The malicious package is named 1337qq-js and was uploaded on the npm repository on December 30, 2019. According to an analysis by the npm security team, the package exfiltrates sensitive information through install scripts and targets UNIX systems only. The npm team recommends that all developers who downloaded or used this JavaScript package in their projects remove the package from their systems and rotate any compromised credentials. This marks the sixth incident of a malicious package making it on the npm repository index, although, this is the least severe, primarily because Microsoft security analysts caught the library two weeks after it was published and before it gained a serious following. Previous incidents of malicious npm packages making it on npm include: