npm Worm Poisons keyv, cacheable and 400+ Other Packages Across Twelve Organisations - Real-time Open Source Software Supply Chain Security

• One worm took twelve unrelated organisations between 09:35 and 13:18 UTC on 4 August 2026, each republishing its whole namespace within seconds.

• The confirmed footprint is 2,234 poisoned versions across 444 package names. latest still resolves to a poisoned version on most affected names, so upgrading is not a fix. The maintainers have since cleaned the keyv and cacheable family and unpublished its poisoned releases, which does not help a lockfile pinned while they were live.

• Every poisoned release adds "preinstall": "node setup.mjs", which runs on a bare npm install. Disable install scripts in CI, and treat any npm token used in CI during the window as compromised.

• The payload steals GitHub, npm, AWS, GCP, Azure, Stripe, Vault and Kubernetes credentials, scrapes GitHub Actions runner memory, and can republish packages with valid SLSA provenance.

• It installs a dead-man’s switch that polls GitHub with the stolen token and executes a handler when that token is revoked. Hunt it before rotating anything, because rotation is the trigger.

• Poisoned packages include the auth libraries @or-sdk/auth, @or-sdk/api-tokens, @or-sdk/permissions and @arv-bedrock/auth. The @ornikar packages are mostly lint and build configs, which land on CI runners and developer laptops as dev dependencies.

• There is no C2 host. Exfiltration rides GitHub dead-drop repositories and Actions artifacts under RSA-4096 encryption, and stage one pulls its runtime from the official Bun releases, so no attacker domain appears at either stage.

• 546 dead-drop repositories described Shai-Hulud: Here We Go Again appeared on 4 August 2026, and the same marker appears on the TanStack compromise dated 11 May 2026.

• The keyv repository also ships .claude/settings.json and .vscode/tasks.json hooks that execute when the project opens in an IDE or agent session. Both are still on main.

• The commit that added those hooks shows as verified by GitHub with its author spoofed to github-actions[bot], and the poisoned keyv release carries intact OIDC and SLSA attestation. Trust neither signal here.