Malicious code in picasso-plugin-hammer (npm)
npm/picasso-plugin-hammer is affected by the large-scale, self-propagating npm supply-chain worm of 2026-08-04 (the "Shai-Hulud: Here We Go Again" wave) — the same campaign that began with the compromise of the keyv and cacheable maintainer account. The listed version(s) were trojanized and republished by the worm after it reached an npm publish token belonging to a maintainer in this namespace; the payload enumerates every package a stolen token controls and republishes each with the same hook, so many packages under this scope were poisoned in the same short window. Every poisoned release adds a preinstall hook ("preinstall": "node setup.mjs") that runs on a bare npm install, before any project code. setup.mjs downloads a standalone Bun runtime and runs a byte-identical, heavily obfuscated ~728 KB second-stage credential stealer (shipped as Math_Symbol.js / math_init.js). It harvests GitHub, npm, AWS, GCP, Azure, HashiCorp Vault and Kubernetes credentials plus generic secrets and private keys (TruffleHog-style sweep), reads CI/CD secrets and identifies build runners, then republishes further packages the stolen token can reach. Rather than a fixed command-and-control host, it exfiltrates stolen findings to attacker-created GitHub repositories (descriptions reading "Shai-Hulud: Here We Go Again") and over DNS. Treat any environment that installed an affected version (with install scripts enabled) as compromised: rotate and revoke all reachable credentials (npm and GitHub tokens, cloud keys, Vault/Kubernetes secrets, and CI org/repo secrets). Part of the August 2026 npm worm that poisoned 400+ packages across many organizations.
Source: amazon-inspector
This package impersonates Qlik's legitimate picasso-plugin-hammer (correct name, author, repository, and a genuine dist/picasso-hammer.js as cover) but adds a preinstall lifecycle hook node setup.mjs. setup.mjs downloads a Bun runtime archive from github.com/oven-sh/bun releases, extracts and chmods the bun binary in a temp directory, and invokes it via execFileSync against the sibling file math_init.js shipped in the tarball. math_init.js is a 727 KB single-line, string-array-rotation obfuscated Bun-cjs bundle (// @bun @bun-cjs header, hex-named identifiers) unrelated to the advertised HammerJS plugin and undocumented in the upstream Qlik repository. Fetching a second language runtime specifically to execute an opaque in-tarball payload at install time evades Node-based install-time scanners and yields arbitrary code execution on the installer's host on npm install.
Source: ghsa-malware
Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.
