Malicious code in @marketfront/digitalherobannercarousel (npm)
The @marketfront/digitalherobannercarousel package is part of a 25-package malicious campaign batch-published to the @marketfront npm scope by npm user 'marketfront' ([email protected]) within a roughly 3-minute window on 2026-07-01. All packages in the campaign were published at version 7.0.0 and use e-commerce/marketing frontend component names as cover.
The package declares a postinstall hook (node scripts/postinstall.js) that executes heavily obfuscated (obfuscator.io-style) code automatically at npm install time. Static analysis of the decoded payload revealed a credential harvester that dynamically requires fs, os, http, https, zlib, path and dns, then reads approximately 20 sensitive credential files including ~/.ssh, ~/.aws/credentials, ~/.kube/config, ~/.docker/config.json, ~/.npmrc, ~/.netrc, ~/.pgpass, ~/.git-credentials, ~/.env and ~/.bash_history. Collected data is exfiltrated via a gzip-compressed HTTPS POST with a custom X-Secret header to the path /api/v1/events, alongside a DNS resolver beacon. The command-and-control host is concealed behind an additional RC4+XOR encryption layer around an embedded configuration blob and was not statically resolved.
The decoded behavioral payload (module requires, credential-file target list, exfiltration headers and endpoint) is byte-for-byte identical across sampled packages in the campaign. The campaign shares tooling and infrastructure patterns (obfuscated postinstall credential harvester, X-Secret header, /api/v1/events exfiltration path, RC4-concealed C2) with the earlier @emcd-vue campaign, indicating the same actor rotating scopes and disposable maintainer emails.
Source: amazon-inspector
@marketfront/[email protected] is a dependency-confusion lure published to public npm under a scope the target organization does not own. The tarball has no real library implementation (dist/index.js re-exports a src/index.js that is not shipped), and package.json declares 'postinstall': 'node scripts/postinstall.js'. scripts/postinstall.js is a ~160 KB obfuscator.io-style bundle (rotated string array, RC4-decoded literals, control-flow flattening) that decodes strings — module names, env-var names, sensitive file paths, and the C2 host — only at runtime. On npm install, the decoded payload builds a host fingerprint (hostname, username, home/tmp dirs, platform, arch, release, uptime, cpus, memory, network interfaces, plus Windows USERDOMAIN/COMPUTERNAME/APPDATA/LOCALAPPDATA/PROGRAMDATA/TEMP), captures the entire process.env and npm user-agent, and reads/INI-parses local credential/config files via a runtime-derived candidate path list. Collected data is XOR-encrypted and exfiltrated over two channels: base32-encoded chunks issued as dns.resolve() lookups against subdomains of the runtime-decoded C2 host (DNS smuggling for egress-filter evasion), plus HTTPS/HTTP POST of the same encrypted body with retry/backoff. The payload also inspects process.execArgv and NODE_OPTIONS for --inspect/--debug tokens and runs a timing check to skip execution under a debugger or instrumented sandbox.
