Today, Immersive's Container 7 Research Team have released a lab covering a critical supply chain intrusion affecting thousands of customers worldwide originating in malicious npm packages
In late November/early December 2025, a set of critical software supply chain intrusions took place when the highly dangerous Shai-Hulud 2.0 worm was used to steal GitHub, Cloud, and other credentials and secrets by gaining access to developer machines through the use of a malicious npm package installation.
What is this about?
By abusing the inherent trust in the npm ecosystem, Shai-Hulud guarantees execution during the crucial preinstall phase, effectively bypassing many traditional security scans that only review code after installation. Once running, the payload launches a concurrent, parallel attack across your environment: it hunts for local credentials, attempts to steal highly privileged temporary cloud tokens via the Instance Metadata Service (IMDS), and, most critically, can automatically inject itself into every other package the victim maintains on their machine.
Why is this critical for you and your team?
npm is massively popular, and many of the affected packages are widely used in software development and deployment. Shai-Hulud 2.0 is a devastating self-replicating worm that weaponizes your supply chain to steal highly privileged cloud credentials (IMDS) and establish a permanent C2 backdoor via GitHub Actions if the threat actor decides to set that up. Given the importance of npm packages to developers, customers from any organisation, and across all sectors, it is essential that they understand how this intrusion works to prevent their credentials and secrets from being stolen.
Who is the content for?
- Security Analysts
- Incident Responders
- Software Developers/Secure Development teams
- Cloud Engineers
- Vulnerability Management Teams
Here is a link to the lab:
Immerser