PhantomRaven attack floods npm with credential-stealing packages

An active campaign named ‘PhantomRaven’ is targeting developers with dozens of malicious npm packages that steal authentication tokens, CI/CD secrets, and GitHub credentials. The activity started in August and deployed 126 npm packages that counted more than 86,000 downloads. The Node Package Manager (NPM) is the default package manager for Node.js, used by JavaScript developers to share and install reusable code that comes in the form of distributed packages. PhantomRaven was detected by researchers at Koi Security and includes packages that mimic legitimate projects, and many are the result of AI hallucinated recommendations (“slopsquatting”). Slopsquatting occurs when developers ask LLMs to suggest packages for a project, and the AI assistants recommend non-existent package names that appear legitimate. The researchers say that some malicious packages impersonate GitLab or Apache tools. Most of them are still present on the npm platform at the time of writing. The packages used in the PhantomRaven campaign leverage a remote dynamic dependencies (RDD) system where they declare zero dependencies, but automatically fetch payloads from external URLs during installation. The mechanism fetches packages and executes them automatically when running ‘npm install’, and requires no user interaction. The “side-loaded” payload profiles the infected device to determine the target’s value, and searches the victim’s environment variables for email addresses. Most worryingly, the malware ...