🛡️ MAL-2026-4701 — venturo-playwright-runner

Malicious code in venturo-playwright-runner (npm)

Source: amazon-inspector

The package republishes Microsoft's @playwright/test under the unrelated name venturo-playwright-runner and falsifies its identity to claim Microsoft ownership: package.json sets author.name = "Microsoft Corporation", repository.url = git+https://github.com/microsoft/playwright.git, and homepage = https://playwright.dev. The shipped index.js does module.exports = require('playwright-core'), re-exporting the real upstream module. However, package.json declares a hard dependency on [email protected] — a sibling under the same unknown publisher's namespace that is never require()'d anywhere in the package's code (only playwright-core is imported). Installing this package therefore silently pulls [email protected] into the installer's dependency tree under the cover of a Microsoft-branded Playwright wrapper, with no functional reason for that dependency to be present. The combination of top-tier-publisher impersonation plus a pinned, unused sibling dependency is the canonical shape used to smuggle attacker-controlled code into installers via the dependency graph while keeping the surface package's own code innocuous to scanners.