RATatouille: A Malicious Recipe Hidden in rand-user-agent (Supply Chain Compromise)
On 5 May, 16:00 GMT+0, our automated malware analysis pipeline detected a suspicious package released, rand-user-agent@1.0.110. It detected unusual code in the package, and it wasn’t wrong. It detected signs of a supply chain attack against this legitimate package, which has about ~45.000 weekly downloads.

What is the package?
The package rand-user-agent generates randomized real user-agent strings based on their frequency of occurrence. It’s maintained by the company WebScrapingAPI (https://www.webscrapingapi.com/).
Our analysis engine detected suspicious code in the file dist/index.js. Lets check it out, here seen through the code view on npm’s site:
We’ve got a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) on our hands. Here’s an overview of it:

Behavior Overview
The script sets up a covert communication channel with a command-and-control (C2) server using socket.io-client, while exfiltrating files via axios to a second HTTP endpoint. It dynamically installs these modules if missing, hiding them in a custom .node_modules folder under the user's home directory.

The Socket Research team investigates a malicious Python package disguised as a Discord error logger that executes remote commands and exfiltrates data via a covert C2 channel.
On March 21, 2022, a Python package ‘discordpydebug’ was uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) under the name "Discord py error logger." At first glance, it appeared to be a simple utility aimed at developers working on Discord bots using the Discord.py library. However, the package concealed a fully functional remote access trojan (RAT). Over time, the package reached over 11,000 downloads, placing thousands of developer systems at risk.

The package targeted developers who build or maintain Discord bots, typically indie developers, automation engineers, or small teams who might install such tools without extensive scrutiny. Since PyPI doesn’t enforce deep security audits of uploaded packages, attackers often take advantage of this by using misleading descriptions, legitimate-sounding names, or even copying code from popular projects to appear trustworthy. In this case, the goal was to lure unsuspecting developers into installing a backdoor disguised as a debugging aid.

Discord’s developer ecosystem is both massive and tightly knit. With over 200 million monthly active users, more than 25% of whom interact with third-party apps, Discord has rapidly evolved into a platform where developers not only build but also live test, share, and iterate on new ideas directly with their users. Public and private servers dedicated to development topics foster an informal, highly social culture where tips, tools, and code snippets are shared freely and often used with little scrutiny. It’s within these trusted peer-to-peer spaces that threat actors can exploit social engineering tactics, positioning themselves as helpful community members and promoting tools like discordpydebug under the guise of debugging utilities.

The fact that this package was downloaded over 11,000 times, despite having no README or documentation, highlights how quickly trust can be weaponized in these environments. Whether spread via casual recommendation, targeted DMs, or Discord server threads, such packages can gain traction before ever being formally vetted.

Socket's research uncovers three dangerous Go modules that contain obfuscated disk-wiping malware, threatening complete data loss.

The Go ecosystem, valued for its simplicity, transparency, and flexibility, has exploded in popularity. With over 2 million modules available, developers rely heavily on public repositories like GitHub. However, this openness is precisely what attackers exploit.

No Central Gatekeeping: Developers freely source modules directly from GitHub repositories, trusting the naming conventions implicitly.
Prime Target for Typosquatting: Minimal namespace validation enables attackers to masquerade malicious modules as popular libraries.
Introduction: The Silent Threat#
In April 2025, we detected an attack involving three malicious Go modules which employ similar obfuscation techniques:

github[.]com/truthfulpharm/prototransform
github[.]com/blankloggia/go-mcp
github[.]com/steelpoor/tlsproxy
Despite appearing legitimate, these modules contained highly obfuscated code designed to fetch and execute remote payloads. Socket’s scanners flagged the suspicious behaviors, leading us to a deeper investigation.

A supply-chain attack targets Linux servers with disk-wiping malware hidden in Golang modules published on GitHub.

The campaign was detected last month and relied on three malicious Go modules that included “highly obfuscated code” for retrieving remote payloads and executing them.

Complete disk destruction
The attack appears designed specifically for Linux-based servers and developer environments, as the destructive payload - a Bash script named done.sh, runs a ‘dd’ command for the file-wiping activity.

Furthermore, the payload verifies that it runs in a Linux environment (runtime.GOOS == "linux") before trying to execute.

An analysis from supply-chain security company Socket shows that the command overwrites with zeroes every byte of data, leading to irreversible data loss and system failure.

The target is the primary storage volume, /dev/sda, that holds critical system data, user files, databases, and configurations.

“By populating the entire disk with zeros, the script completely destroys the file system structure, operating system, and all user data, rendering the system unbootable and unrecoverable” - Socket

The researchers discovered the attack in April and identified three Go modules on GitHub, that have since been removed from the platform:

github[.]com/truthfulpharm/prototransform
github[.]com/blankloggia/go-mcp
github[.]com/steelpoor/tlsproxy

Socket’s Threat Research Team uncovered malicious Python packages designed to create a tunnel via Gmail. The threat actor’s email is the only potential clue as to their motivation, but once the tunnel is created, the threat actor can exfiltrate data or execute commands that we may not know about through these packages. These seven packages:

Coffin-Codes-Pro
Coffin-Codes-NET2
Coffin-Codes-NET
Coffin-Codes-2022
Coffin2022
Coffin-Grave
cfc-bsb
use Gmail, making these attempts less likely to be flagged by firewalls and endpoint detection systems since SMTP is commonly treated as legitimate traffic.

These packages have since been removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

Learn how JFrog detected a malicious package that steals MEXC credentials and crypto trading tokens to buy and sell futures on crypto trading platforms.

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.

Malicious npm packages posing as Telegram bot libraries install SSH backdoors and exfiltrate data from Linux developer machines.

Slopsquatting is a new supply chain threat where AI-assisted code generators recommend hallucinated packages that attackers register and weaponize.

tj-actions/changed-files corrupted to run credential-stealing memory scraper.

A new variant of the XCSSET macOS modular malware has emerged in attacks that target users' sensitive information, including digital wallets and data from the legitimate Notes app.

The TL;DR is that this time, we ended up discovering ~150 Amazon S3 buckets that had previously been used across commercial and open source software products, governments, and infrastructure deployment/update pipelines - and then abandoned.

Naturally, we registered them, just to see what would happen - “how many people are really trying to request software updates from S3 buckets that appear to have been abandoned months or even years ago?”, we naively thought to ourselves.

Supply chain attack targets developers using the Go programming language.

New details have emerged about a phishing campaign targeting Chrome browser extension developers that led to the compromise of at least thirty-five extensions to inject data-stealing code, including those from cybersecurity firm Cyberhaven.

To avoid compromised packages being introduced as a dependency in a larger project, security teams need to keep an eye peeled for such malicious code.

A supply chain attack on Rspack's npm packages injected cryptomining malware, potentially impacting thousands of developers.

TL;DR: zizmor would have caught the vulnerability that caused this…mostly. Read on for details.

The popular Ultralytics YOLO11 AI model was compromised in a supply chain attack to deploy cryptominers on devices running versions 8.3.41 and 8.3.42 from the Python Package Index (PyPI)  

Yesterday, Phylum's automated risk detection platform discovered that the PyPI package aiocpa was updated to include malicious code that steals private keys by exfiltrating them through Telegram when users initialize the crypto library. While the attacker published this malicious update to PyPI, they deliberately kept the package's GitHub repository clean

Key findings Executive summary Background Join the Silent Push Community Sign up for a free Silent Push Community account FUNNULL and fake trading apps FUNNULL’s CDN, rising up from corrupted soil Additional hostname analysis FUNNULL CNAME chains An in-depth look at FUNNULL’s corporate brand Suncity Group connections Suncity Group-related infrastructure accounted for more than 6,500