The Socket Threat Research Team has uncovered a significant rise in malicious npm activity linked to North Korean state-sponsored hackers under the long-running “Contagious Interview” operation. Since July 2025, researchers have identified over 338 malicious npm packages that collectively amassed more than 50,000 downloads, with 25 of them still active at the time of reporting. The campaign combines social engineering and software supply chain compromise to target developers in the Web3, cryptocurrency, and blockchain sectors. Threat actors pose as recruiters on LinkedIn, offering fake job opportunities and sending victims “coding assignments” that secretly include npm dependencies carrying encrypted and obfuscated payloads. One documented case involved a developer tricked into downloading a seemingly harmless package named eslint-detector, which actually contained hidden malware. Researchers noted that over 180 fake personas were used to register new npm aliases in a repetitive, wave-based infection model. The attackers’ tools have evolved from BeaverTail droppers to sophisticated variants such as HexEval, XORIndex, and encrypted loaders capable of reconstructing BeaverTail in memory before deploying the InvisibleFerret backdoor. This backdoor is designed for credential theft, keylogging, and remote command execution, operating across Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. The malicious actors rely heavily on typosquatted npm packages that imitate popular libraries like express, dotenv, and nodemailer, as well as fake crypto frameworks such as ethers.js and web3.js. Socket researchers warned that removing infected packages is not enough if the associated publisher accounts remain active. The operation’s goal focuses on stealing developer credentials and cryptocurrency, contributing to the estimated two billion dollars stolen by North Korea-linked groups in 2025 alone.
The researchers uncovered an attack that released 175 malicious npm packages. The packages had been downloaded approximately 26,000 times and were utilized to steal login credentia...
A recently found Python-based Remote Access Trojan (RAT) having the SHA256 hash 7173e20e7ec217f6a1591f1fc9be6d0a4496d78615cc5ccdf7b9a3a37e3ecc3c on VirusTotal exhibits sophisticate...
A severe security flaw, designated CVE-2024-49600, has been discovered in Dell Power Manager (DPM), a widely used software utility for controlling power configurations on Dell comp...