On May 19, somebody logged into a single npm account and, over the next twenty-two minutes, published 637 malicious versions across 317 software packages. I wish the attack had been a least a little bit interesting, but it wasn't.
They logged in with valid credentials, the registry said welcome back, and an automated script did the rest. The poisoned packages included echarts-for-react, a charting wrapper that pulls well over a million downloads a week, along with a pile of the @antv data-visualization libraries that sit quietly underneath dashboards at companies that have never once heard the name AntV. The payload was a 498-kilobyte obfuscated script that went looking for everything worth stealing: AWS keys, Kubernetes service-account tokens, GitHub tokens, npm tokens, SSH keys, and the local vaults of 1Password and Bitwarden. If your project carried "echarts-for-react": "^3.0.6" in its package.json, that innocent little caret resolved you to the malicious 3.2.7 on the next clean install. You did not have to do anything wrong; you only had to have done everything normal.
This one is called Mini Shai-Hulud, and it is the small, fast cousin of the Shai-Hulud worm that tore through npm last September, the self-replicating one that used each maintainer's stolen token to poison the next maintainer's packages and backdoored hundreds of them before anyone could react. The mechanism never changes; it's always one account with all the trust, and the account belongs to a person.
