Malicious code in time-utils-helper (npm)
The package advertises itself as a time-formatting utility (index.js exports formatDate/capitalize/truncate) but ships a postinstall.js lifecycle script that runs on npm install and performs unrelated cloud credential harvesting. postinstall.js uses child_process.exec to shell out to curl against multi-cloud instance metadata services (AWS 169.254.169.254, Aliyun 100.100.100.200, Tencent metadata.tencentyun.com, GCP metadata.google.internal, Azure), extracts AWS IAM security credentials for the instance role into /tmp/.iam-creds, and transmits hostname, user, and the IAM credential material as HTTP GET query-string parameters to the hardcoded Burp Collaborator subdomain pzs5w7ntzhsnepwk564lyfdci3oucl0a.oastify.com. The mismatch between the declared trivial utility purpose and the install-time cloud-metadata scraping identifies the package as a decoy delivery vehicle for credential theft.
MAL-2026-12225 is recorded against 1 package.
Published on 5 August 2026. No public exploit is currently recorded for this entry. Record sourced from OSV.
Details
Affected Packages
| Software | From version | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| time-utils-helper | — | — |
References
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