ChainDrop Worm Infects 435 Npm Packages in Devastating Supply Chain Attack
A self-propagating supply chain worm, dubbed ChainDrop by researchers at StepSecurity, has infected over 435 npm packages and 1,557 versions across more than a dozen victim organizations. The attack began on August 4, 2026, and is still ongoing.
The worm, a descendant of the Shai-Hulud 2.0 worm, uses Ethereum blockchain C2 to communicate with its command center. It steals credentials, publishes malicious packages, and burrows into AI developer tooling.
The attack began when 11 verified full worm carriers in the jaredwray ecosystem were published through their own trusted publishing workflows. These packages, including keyv@6.0.0 (over 150M weekly downloads) and flat-cache@6.1.24 (149.9M), carried the same infection pattern: a preinstall dropper that downloads the legitimate Bun JavaScript runtime.
The worm's second stage obfuscated payload executes automatically during npm install, stealing credentials and publishing more malicious packages using harvested CI credentials.