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npm Package Uses Prompt Injection and Token Flooding to Disrupt AI Malware Scanners

Last week, Socket Threat Research reported that newer Mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Hades packages were embedding fake prompt-injection headers before obfuscated JavaScript payloads. Those comments did not affect runtime execution, but they appeared designed to interfere with AI-assisted malware review. Now we are seeing that same idea tested more directly in a package that appears designed to probe how AI-based scanners handle prompt injection, safety-triggering content, and context flooding.…

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Introducing Manifest Alerts

Socket now detects missing lockfiles with Manifest Alerts, a new kind of alert for supply chain risks found in project manifests. The feature was built in response to a real problem customers faced during the Axios npm compromise. Due to the complexities of modern dependency resolution, the blast radius of this incident was much wider than it initially appeared. Exposure was not limited to projects that directly depended on the compromised Axios version. For teams with committed lockfiles and…

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GlassWASM: WebAssembly Malware Found in Trojanized Open VSX Extensions

Socket’s Threat Research team discovered compiled WebAssembly malware embedded in trojanized code extensions for Visual Studio Code. At the time of publication, we identified the following affected package versions on the Open VSX marketplace: exargd/vsblack@0.0.1 noellee-doc/flint-debug@0.1.1 These extensions ship a WebAssembly payload behind a renamed TinyGo loader, and both auto-execute it on extension activation via an appended bootstrap that instantiates the module with go.run(). The…

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Socket for Linear Is Now Available

When Socket flags a malicious package or a vulnerable dependency, some fixes are quick: bump a version, drop a package, patch and move on. Plenty of others need to be tracked, assigned to the right person, and prioritized against everything else a team is working on. That kind of work lives in an issue tracker. Linear has earned a loyal following among engineering teams, prized for its speed and the clarity of its workflow. So today we're excited to announce Socket for Linear, which plugs…

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US Government Forces Anthropic to Pull Claude Fable Days After Launch

For three days, Claude Fable 5 had users around the world one-shotting work they expected to take days or weeks: major code reviews, migrations, long-running builds, and projects some described as career-changing. Then access disappeared. If you were waiting for the weekend to try Claude Fable 5, you’re out of luck. Anthropic suspended access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on Friday night after receiving a US government export control directive blocking access by foreign nationals,…

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152 Chrome Live Wallpaper Extensions Hid Ad Tracking and Faked Google Search Traffic

Socket's Threat Research Team identified a family of 152 Chrome Web Store new-tab "live wallpaper" extensions, built from one shared codebase but distributed across 38 separate Chrome Web Store publisher accounts and three brand backends, carrying a combined total of approximately 105,000 reported installs. Every listing declares on the Chrome Web Store that it will not collect or use user data, while the linked privacy policy admits the opposite: that the extensions log IP addresses, ISP,…

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Andrew Becherer Joins Socket as Chief Information Security Officer

AI now writes as much as 90% of code at top engineering organizations, and the developers downstream of that code pull in open source they've never reviewed. Package hijackings and maintainer compromises that were once a handful of incidents a year now happen weekly. Modern engineering organizations depend on open source to ship faster, and they need security partners who can keep pace with that shift. Today, we're welcoming Andrew Becherer as Socket's first Chief Information Security Officer.…

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Socket Partners with Replit to Block Malicious Packages in AI-Powered Development

The way software gets built is changing fast. Developers are no longer the only ones choosing dependencies. AI agents can now recommend, install, and wire open source packages into applications as part of the build process. Replit is at the center of that shift, giving millions of builders a faster path from idea to working software. As more of that work happens inside AI-powered workflows, dependency security has to move closer to the moment packages are selected and installed. Socket Firewall…

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npm Tooling Bug Incorrectly Marks One-Character Packages as Security Holders

npm incorrectly applied security-holder metadata to multiple one-character packages, including letters, numbers, and the - package. Socket reviewed public npm registry metadata and found several affected packages had been assigned 0.0.1-security or 0.0.1-security.0 versions, with the latest dist-tag moved to the security placeholder. Older package versions remained available. npm confirmed the markings were not intentional and that they are working on rolling it back. “This happened due to a…

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Mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Hades Worms Target Bioinformatics and MCP Developers via Malicious PyPI Wheels

Socket Threat Research team identified a newer PyPI wave connected to the broader Mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Hades supply chain attacks. This wave expands beyond the 37 malicious PyPI wheels covered in our weekend report and shows that the threat actors are iterating quickly across delivery mechanisms, package themes, and runtime triggers. The campaign has since added 23 newly identified PyPI package-version artifacts, expanding beyond the 37 malicious PyPI wheels covered in our weekend…

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Shai-Hulud Descends to Hades: Miasma Worm Campaign Spreads with New PyPI Wave

Socket detected a coordinated PyPI compromise involving 37 malicious wheel artifacts across 19 packages. The compromised releases shipped a *-setup.pth file that attempts to execute automatically during Python startup, download the Bun JavaScript runtime, and run an obfuscated JavaScript payload named _index.js. Socket’s AI malware detection system identified the malicious package cluster minutes after publication. The attack is cross-runtime, and the tradecraft is unmistakably Shai-Hulud /…

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RubyGems Adds Cooldown Feature to Bundler for Newly Published Gems

RubyGems and Bundler 4.0.13 introduced an opt-in cooldown feature that can delay installation of newly published gem versions, bringing a time-based supply chain defense to Ruby’s package management workflow. The feature allows developers to configure Bundler so it will not resolve to a gem version until it has been public for a set number of days. In the example published by RubyGems maintainer Hiroshi SHIBATA, a project can add a cooldown directly to its Gemfile: source…

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pnpm 11.5 Adds Support for Recognizing npm Staged Publishes

pnpm 11.5 now treats npm staged publishing approvals as strong trust evidence, fixing a false-positive downgrade warning that could appear when packages used npm’s newer 2FA-backed release flow. The change lands as npm continues tightening package publishing controls after a series of credential theft and token abuse incidents. In the Mini Shai-Hulud campaign, attackers used stolen npm tokens to publish malicious package versions, prompting npm to invalidate granular access tokens and…

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Federal Audit Finds NIST Wasted Funds With No Plan to Clear NVD Backlog

A newly released federal audit now documents NIST’s long-running NVD backlog, with findings that are hard to square with two years of public assurances that the database was being brought back under control. The U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Inspector General found that NIST had no strategic plan for the National Vulnerability Database, set a public deadline it did not have the capacity to meet, delayed use of CISA enrichment data, and spent taxpayer funds on duplicated vulnerability…

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Mini Shai-Hulud Campaign Hits Red Hat Cloud Services npm Packages

Socket has detected a malicious npm supply chain campaign involving compromised @redhat-cloud-services packages published under the Red Hat Cloud Services namespace. This is effectively a mini Shai-Hulud campaign: it uses the same core tactics of install-time execution, credential harvesting, CI/CD targeting, encrypted exfiltration, and potential downstream propagation. Since TeamPCP recently released Shai-Hulud as open source attack tooling while promoting a BreachForums contest for package…

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