Axios Maintainer Confirms Social Engineering Attack Behind npm Compromise

On March 31, two malicious versions of Axios were briefly published to npm, introducing a dependency that installed a remote access trojan across macOS, Windows, and Linux. We covered the initial attack and its scope earlier, as well as a deeper technical analysis of its hidden blast radius and how dependency resolution expanded its impact exponentially. Now, the project’s lead maintainer has shared additional details about how the compromise occurred. A Targeted Social Engineering Attack # In…