Today, the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the launch of the FAIR Package Manager project, a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users. The FAIR Package Manager project, through its contributors, creates net new interoperability, making the web publishing ecosystem more innovative and accessible for all.
Vendor-neutral package management for content management systems like WordPress provides critical universal infrastructure that addresses the new realities of content, e-commerce and AI. The FAIR Package Manager project helps make plugins and tools more discoverable and lets developers choose where to source those plugins depending on the needs of their supply chain. By giving commercial plugin developers, hosts, and application developers more options to control the tools they rely on, the FAIR Package Manager project promotes innovation and protects business continuity.
“The FAIR Package Manager project paves the way for the stability and growth of open source content management, giving contributors and businesses additional options governed by a neutral community,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. ”We look forward to the growth in community and contributions this important project attracts.”
Threat actor used malicious Google Invites and hidden Unicode “Private Use Access” characters (PUAs) to brilliantly obfuscate and hide a malicious NPM package.
On March 19th, 2025, we discovered a package called os-info-checker-es6 and were taken aback. We could tell it was not doing what it said on the tin. But what's the deal? We decided to investigate the matter and initially hit some dead ends. But patience pays off, and we eventually got most of the answers we sought. We also learned about Unicode PUAs (No, not pick-up artists). It was a roller coaster ride of emotions!
The official XPRL (Ripple) NPM package was compromised by sophisticated attackers who put in a backdoor to steal cryptocurrency private keys and gain access to cryptocurrency wallets.
On July 13, 2024, the Phylum platform alerted us to a series of odd packages published to the npm package registry. At first glance, these packages appear entirely legitimate; however, as our system automatically noted, they contained sophisticated command and control functionality hidden in image files that would be executed
Another fun exploit! This time with local privilege escalation through Apple’s PackageKit.framework when running ZSH-based PKGs 🎉.
Lass Security's recent research on AI Package Hallucinations extends the attack technique to GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, Gemini Pro (Bard), and Coral (Cohere).
Redline Dropped Through MSIX Package, Author&colon
Despite open source software’s essential role in all software built today, it’s far too easy for bad actors to circulate malicious packages that attack the systems and users running that software. Unlike mobile app stores that can scan for and reject malicious contributions, package repositories have limited resources to review the thousands of daily updates and must maintain an open model where anyone can freely contribute. As a result, malicious packages like ua-parser-js, and node-ipc are regularly uploaded to popular repositories despite their best efforts, with sometimes devastating consequences for users.
Today we’re pleased to announce the initial prototype version of the Package Analysis project, an OpenSSF project addressing the challenge of identifying malicious packages in popular open source repositories. In just one month of analysis, the project identified more than 200 malicious packages uploaded to PyPI and npm.
When code with millions of downloads nukes user files, bad things can happen.
