Vercel said the fallout from an attack on its internal systems hit more customers than previously known, as ongoing analysis uncovered additional evidence of compromise.
The company, which makes tools and hosts cloud infrastructure for developers, maintains a “small number” of accounts were impacted, but it has yet to share a number or range of known incidents linked to the attack. Vercel created and maintains Next.js, a platform supporting AI agents that’s downloaded more than 9 million times per week, and other popular open-source projects.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said the company and partners have analyzed nearly a petabyte of logs across the Vercel network and API, and learned malicious activity targeting the company and its customers extends beyond an initial attack that originated at Context.ai.
“Threat intel points to the distribution of malware to computers in search of valuable tokens like keys to Vercel accounts and other providers,” Rauch said in a post on X.
“Once the attacker gets ahold of those keys, our logs show a repeated pattern: rapid and comprehensive API usage, with a focus on enumeration of non-sensitive environment variables,” he added.
The attack exemplifies the widespread and compounded risk posed by interconnected systems that rely on OAuth tokens, trusted relationships and overly privileged permissions linking multiple services together.
“The real vulnerability was trust, not technology,” Munish Walther-Puri, head of critical digital infrastructure at TPO Group, told CyberScoop. “OAuth turned a productivity app into a backdoor. Every AI tool an employee connects to their work account is now a potential attack surface.”
An attacker traversed Vercel’s internal systems to steal and decrypt customer data, including environment variables it stored, posing significant downstream risk.
The company insists the breach originated at Context.ai, a third-party AI tool used by one of its employees. Researchers at Hudson Rock previously said the seeds of that attack were planted in February when a Context.ai employee’s computer was infected with Lumma Stealer malware after they searched for Roblox game exploits, a common vector for infostealer deployments.
Vercel has not specified the systems and customers data compromised, nor has it described the threat eradicated or contained. The company said it’s found no evidence of tampering across the software packages it publishes, concluding “we believe the supply chain remains safe.”
The company fueled further intrigue in its updated security bulletin, noting that it also identified a separate “small number of customers” that were compromised in attacks unrelated to the breach of its systems.
“These compromises do not appear to have originated on Vercel systems,” the company said. “This activity does not appear to be a continuation or expansion of the April incident, nor does it appear to be evidence of an earlier Vercel security incident.”
It’s unclear how Vercel became aware of those attacks and why it’s disclosing them publicly.
Vercel declined to answer questions, and Mandiant, which is running incident response and an investigation into the attack, referred questions back to Vercel.
Vercel has not attributed the breach to any named threat group or described the attackers’ objectives.
An online persona identifying themselves as ShinyHunters took responsibility for the attack and is attempting to sell the stolen data, which they claim includes access keys, source code and databases. Austin Larsen, principal threat analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said the attacker is “likely an imposter,” but emphasized the risk of exposure is real.
Walther-Puri warned that the downstream blast radius from the attack on its systems remains undefined. “Stolen API keys and source code snippets from internal views are potentially keys to customer production environments,” he said.
The stolen data attackers claim to have “sounds almost boring … but it’s infrastructure intelligence,” Walther-Puri added. “The right environment variable doesn’t just unlock a system — it lets adversaries become that system, silently, from the inside.”
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Vercel customers are at risk of compromise after an attacker hopped through multiple internal systems to steal credentials and other sensitive data, the company said in a security bulletin Sunday.
The attack, which didn’t originate at Vercel, showcases the pitfalls of interconnected cloud applications and SaaS integrations with overly privileged permissions.
An attacker traversed third-party systems and connections left exposed by employees before it hit the San Francisco-based company that created and maintains Next.js and other popular open-source libraries.
Researchers at Hudson Rock said the seeds of the attack were planted in February when a Context.ai employee’s computer was infected with Lumma Stealer malware after they searched for Roblox game exploits, a common vector for infostealer deployments.
Each of the companies are pinning at least some blame for the attack on the other vendor.
Context.ai on Sunday said that breach allowed the attacker to access its AWS environment and OAuth tokens for some users, including a token for a Vercel employee’s Google Workspace account. Vercel is not a Context customer, but the Vercel employee was using Context AI Office Suite and granted it full access, the artificial intelligence agent company said.
“The attacker used that access to take over the employee’s Vercel Google Workspace account, which enabled them to gain access to some Vercel environments and environment variables that were not marked as sensitive,” Vercel said in its bulletin.
The company said a limited number of its customers are impacted and were immediately advised to rotate credentials. Vercel, which declined to answer questions, did not specify which internal systems were accessed or fully explain how the attacker gained access to Vercel customers’ credentials.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said customer data stored by the company is fully encrypted, yet the attacker got further access through enumeration, or by counting and inventorying specific variables.
“We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI,” he said in a post on X. “They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.”
A threat group identifying itself as ShinyHunters took responsibility for the attack in a post on Telegram and is attempting to sell the stolen data, which they claim includes access keys, source code and databases.
The attacker “is likely an imposter attempting to use an established name to inflate their notoriety,” Austin Larsen, principal threat analyst at Google Threat Intelligence, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Regardless of the threat actor involved, the exposure risk is real.”
Vercel also warned that the attack on Context’s Google Workspace OAuth app “was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting its hundreds of users across many organizations.” It published indicators of compromise and encouraged customers to review activity logs, review and rotate variables containing secrets.
Context and Vercel said their separate and coordinated investigations into the attack aided by CrowdStrike and Mandiant remain underway.
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CISOs face a shrinking window to prepare as AI models like Mythos collapse the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation, driving a new era of high-velocity cyberattacks.
The post ‘Mythos-Ready’ Security: CSA Urges CISOs to Prepare for Accelerated AI Threats appeared first on SecurityWeek.
OpenAI updated its security certificates and is requiring all macOS users to update to the latest versions after determining its products, along with many others, were impacted by a widespread supply-chain attack that briefly infected a popular open-source library in late March, the company said in a blog post Friday.
The artificial intelligence vendor said it “found no evidence that OpenAI user data was accessed, that our systems or intellectual property was compromised, or that our software was altered.”
Yet, because a GitHub workflow the company uses to sign certificates for macOS applications downloaded and executed a malicious version of Axios, the company is treating the soon-to-be defunct certificate as compromised.
A North Korean hacking group injected malware into two versions of Axios after it compromised the lead maintainer’s computer via social engineering and took over his npm and GitHub accounts. Jason Saayman, the lead maintainer for Axios, said the malicious versions of the software were live for about three hours before removal.
Google Threat Intelligence Group, which tracks the threat group as UNC1069, said the impact of the attack was broad with ripple effects potentially exposing other popular packages. The JavaScript libraries flow into dependent downstream software through more than 100 million and 83 million downloads weekly.
The attack was discovered just weeks after a series of other open-source tools, including Trivy, were compromised by UNC6780, also known as TeamPCP, resulting in aggressive extortion attempts.
OpenAI insists the malware that infected Axios did not directly impact its certificate, which is designed to help customers confirm they are downloading legitimate software.
“The signing certificate present in this workflow was likely not successfully exfiltrated by the malicious payload due to the timing of the payload execution, certificate injection into the job, sequencing of the job itself, and other mitigating factors,” the company said in the blog post. “Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution we are treating the certificate as compromised, and are revoking and rotating it.”
Older versions of OpenAI’s macOS apps may lose functionality and will no longer be supported when the certificate is fully revoked May 8, the company said.
OpenAI, which hired a third-party digital forensics and incident response firm to aid its investigation and response, pinned the root cause of the security issue on a misconfiguration in its GitHub workflow. The company said it corrected that error and worked with Apple to ensure fraudulent apps posing as OpenAI cannot use the impacted certificate.
The 30-day window is designed to minimize disruption for users, but OpenAI said it will speed up the revocation deadline if it identifies any malicious activity. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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A hacker briefly delivered malware this week through a popular open-source project for software developers that has an estimated 100 million weekly downloads, raising the possibility of compromises spreading widely through a supply-chain attack.
Axios is a JavaScript client library used in web requests. The unknown attacker hijacked the npm account — npm being a package manager for JavaScript — of the lead axios maintainer, and then published malicious versions of axios with remote access trojans to npm. That happened on Sunday night going into Monday morning, cybersecurity firm Huntress said, before the poisoned versions were pulled.
Aikido, another security firm, called it “one of the most impactful npm supply chain attacks on record.” Researchers at a large number of cyber companies have sounded alarms about the attack, including Step Security, Socket, Endor Labs and others.
According to Step Security, the malicious “axios@1.14.1” and “axios@0.30.4” versions inject a new software dependency, plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, that acts as a loader for the malware. It targets MacOS, Windows and Linux devices.
But, while the researchers describe it as malware, they note that “there are zero lines of malicious code inside axios itself.” Rather, the software is simply functioning as designed — or redesigned.
“Both poisoned releases inject a fake dependency… never imported anywhere in the axios source, whose sole purpose is to run a [post installation] script that deploys a cross-platform remote access trojan,” wrote Ashish Kurmi, chief technology officer and founder of Step Security.
Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO and founder of Socket, called the situation “a live compromise” with a wide potential blast radius.
“This is textbook supply chain installer malware,” Aboukhadijeh wrote on X Monday evening, adding about the malicious versions that “Every npm install pulling the latest version is potentially compromised right now.”
The software package pulled in by the malicious versions of axios has embedded payloads that evade static cybersecurity analysis methods and confound human reviewers, and deletes and renames artifacts to destroy forensic evidence.
Aboukhadijeh gave blunt advice for anyone who had downloaded or used axios in the past week at least.
“If you use axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lockfiles,” he wrote. “Do not upgrade.”
Kurmi described the attack as “precision,” noting that the malicious dependency was staged less than 24 hours in advance and both malicious versions were poisoned within the same hour.
Given the timeframe during which the malicious axios versions were online, that could translate into approximately 600,000 downloads, said Joshua Wright, SANS Institute faculty fellow and senior technical director at Counter Hack Innovations.
“That’s a large number of compromises, and as soon as you install the software, it scrapes access credentials, and so now threat actors could pivot to AWS, other GitHub packages through scraped GitHub keys, and that’s the part that’s really difficult to articulate,” he told CyberScoop, warning that the fallout could stretch for weeks. “We’re going to see more and more stories about people that realize they’ve gotten breached, as today they’re trying to figure out what the impact is of that.”
The attack follows closely on the heels of other cases of developer-oriented targeting.
Google Threat Intelligence Group said the attack wasn’t related to the recent TeamPCP attacks, however, instead saying it had attributed the axios attack to a suspected North Korean hacking group it labels UNC1069.
“Korean hackers have deep experience with supply chain attacks, which they’ve historically used to steal cryptocurrency,” said John Hultquist, the unit’s chief analyst. “The full breadth of this incident is still unclear, but given the popularity of the compromised package, we expect it will have far reaching impacts.”
This story was updated March 31, 2026, with comments from Google Threat Intelligence Group.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Mandiant is responding to a major, ongoing supply-chain attack involving the compromise of Trivy, a widely used open-source tool from Aqua Security that’s designed to find vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in code repositories.
The fallout from the attack spree, which was first detected March 19, is extensive and poses substantial risk for follow-on compromises and threatening extortion attempts.
“We know over 1,000 impacted SaaS environments right now that are actively dealing with this particular threat campaign,” Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting said during a threat briefing held in conjunction with the RSAC 2026 Conference. “That thousand-plus downstream victims will probably expand into another 500, another 1,000, maybe another 10,000.”
Attackers stole a privileged access token and established a foothold in Trivy’s repository automation process by exploiting a misconfiguration in the tool’s GitHub Actions environment in late February, Aqua Security said in a blog post.
On March 1, the company tried to block an ongoing breach by changing its credentials. They later realized the attempt failed, which allowed the attacker to stay in the system using valid logins. Attackers published malicious releases of Trivy on March 19.
“While this activity initially appeared to be an isolated event, it was the result of a broader, multi-stage supply-chain attack that began weeks earlier,” Aqua Security said in the blog post.
By compromising the tool, attackers gained access to secrets for many organizations, Carmakal said. “There will likely be many other software packages, supply-chain attacks and a variety of other compromises as a result of what’s playing out right now.”
Mandiant expects widespread breach disclosures, follow-on attacks and a variety of downstream impacts to play out over the next several months.
The attackers, which the incident response firm has yet to name, are collaborating with multiple threat groups mostly based in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. These cybercriminals “are known for being exceptionally aggressive with their extortion,” Carmakal said. “They’re very loud, they’re very aggressive.”
Mandiant is still working to identify the root of the initial attack. “We can’t quite tell how those credentials were stolen, because it is our belief that those credentials were not stolen from that victim’s environment,” Carmakal said.
The credentials were likely stolen from another cloud environment, a business process outsourcer, partner or the personal computer of an engineer, he added.
Aqua said Sygnia, which is investigating the attack and assisting in remediation efforts, identified additional suspicious activity Sunday involving unauthorized changes and repository changes — activity that is consistent with the attacker’s previously observed behavior.
“This development suggests that the incident is part of an ongoing and evolving attack, with the threat actor reestablishing access. Our investigation is actively focused on validating that all access paths have been identified and fully closed,” the company said.
Aqua, in its latest update Tuesday, said it is continuing to revoke and rotate credentials across all environments and claimed there is still no indication its commercial products are affected.
Many attackers are currently weaponizing access and likely targeting additional victims, yielding to potential extortion attempts and the compromise of additional software, Carmakal said.
“It’s going to be a different outcome for a lot of different organizations,” he said. “This will be a very concentrated focus of the adversaries and their expansion group of partners that they’re collaborating with right now.”
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The phrase “Move fast and break things” is a guiding philosophy in the technology industry. The phrase was coined by Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg more than two decades ago: an operational directive for Facebook developers to prioritize speed and innovation even at the cost of stability. “Unless you are breaking stuff,” Zuckerberg told Business Insider in a 2009 interview, “you are not moving fast enough.”
But Zuckerberg’s call was heard well beyond Facebook’s offices. The tech industry has embraced the philosophy for close to two decades, with benefits that are visible all around us: from Tik-Tok influencers, to contactless mobile payments, self-driving taxis, and AI-powered glasses.
Practically, however, the culture of “move fast and break things” produced firms that prioritize fast release cycles and feature development over software security and resilience. They move fast and make broken things: vulnerable and poorly designed applications, services and devices that are preyed on by cybercriminal groups and hostile nations. Consider the China-backed APT groups targeting both known and “zero-day” flaws in on-premises Microsoft Sharepoint instances in 2025 and Ivanti VPN devices in 2023. Those campaigns led to the compromise of hundreds of organizations globally, including U.S. federal agencies and critical infrastructure operators.
Then there was the campaign by the China-backed threat actor UNC6395 who targeted customers of Salesforce using OAuth tokens stolen from the third party application Salesloft Drift to exfiltrate large volumes of data from hundreds of Salesforce instances.
These incidents highlight two key features of today’s cyberthreat landscape. First, attackers exploit older applications with legacy code that contains high-severity security vulnerabilities. Second, they target large, complex cloud platforms like Salesforce by compromising vulnerable third-party integrations, software dependencies, and poorly managed APIs.
This problem is compounded by a dangerous assumption: that software suppliers are trustworthy and secure. This mindset is outdated. In the past, supply chain attacks were rare, development cycles took months or years, and applying patches quickly was the gold standard. Today, in the “move fast” era, code can go from development to production in days, hours, or even seconds.”
Consider the recent Trust Wallet breach. In December, the cryptocurrency application vendor disclosed that hackers stole approximately $8.5 million in crypto assets through a compromised Google Chrome extension. The root cause was a November outbreak of the Shai Hulud registry-native worm, which leaked Trust Wallet developers’ GitHub credentials. With these credentials, attackers accessed Trust Wallet’s browser extension source code and the Chrome Web Store (CWS) API key, the company said in a blog post. This allowed them to upload malicious extension builds directly to the store, bypassing Trust Wallet’s standard security reviews. Within days, Trust Wallet users awoke to find their wallets emptied.
By compromising “pre-blessed” channels like software updates from trusted suppliers or open source projects, criminal and nation-state attackers can extend their reach into sensitive IT environments.
The solution to problems like this starts with recognizing that the “move fast and break things” era must end. As software powers everything from database servers to dishwashers and tractors, vendors must prioritize security to meet market demands and regulatory requirements. This means proving their software is secure. Traditional application security testing tools—like software composition analysis (SCA), static application security testing (SAST), and dynamic application security testing (DAST)—are part of the solution.
However, today’s threat landscape requires software publishers to look beyond appsec’s “usual suspects.” They must test compiled binaries before release to detect tampering or malicious code that typically evades traditional application security tools. After all, that’s what we saw with incidents like the hacks of Solarwinds’ Orion or VoIP provider 3CX’s Desktop App.
Software publishers also need to prioritize code quality, security and transparency. They can do that by establishing ambitious “zero vulnerability” goals that incentivize them to address problems like “code rot” (reliance on old and vulnerable software modules). They must also embrace transparency by publishing bills of materials for their products—including SBOMs (software bills of materials), MLBOMs (machine learning bills of materials), and SaaSBOMs. Knowing what is in the software your organization consumes can be critical to heading off attacks that exploit vulnerable software dependencies or other supply chain weaknesses.
Should tech firms still move fast and innovate? Absolutely. But in 2026, innovation and rapid releases must be balanced with an even greater priority: building secure, resilient technology that protects both vendors and customers from attacks. Instead of “move fast and break things,” we need a new rallying cry: “Make Smart and Safe Things.”
Saša Zdjelar is the Chief Trust Officer (CTrO) at ReversingLabs and Operating Partner at Crosspoint Capital with nearly 20 years of Fortune 10 global executive leadership experience. His CTrO scope includes leadership, oversight and governance of the CISO/CSO function, including product security, as well as partnering with other leaders on corporate and product strategy, strategic partnerships and research, and customer and technology advisory boards, including sponsoring the ReversingLabs CISO Council.
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Microsoft announced Wednesday that it worked with international law enforcement to seize infrastructure used to run cybercrime subscription service RedVDS and organized civil actions in the United States and United Kingdom to disrupt its further use.
RedVDS has enabled at least $40 million in fraud losses in the U.S. since March 2025, according to Microsoft. Victims that are joining Microsoft as co-plaintiffs in the civil action include Alabama-based H2 Pharma, a pharmaceutical company that lost more than $7.3 million, and Florida-based Gatehouse Dock Condominium Association, which was tricked out of nearly $500,000.
“For as little as US $24 a month, RedVDS provides criminals with access to disposable virtual computers that make fraud cheap, scalable and difficult to trace,” Steven Masada, assistant general counsel at Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, said in a blog post. “It provides access to cheap, effective, and disposable virtual computers running unlicensed software, including Windows, allowing criminals to operate quickly, anonymously and across borders.”
Microsoft said a joint operation with Europol and authorities in Germany allowed it to seize RedVDS’s infrastructure and take the marketplace offline. Cybercriminals used the site, which included a loyalty program and referral bonuses for customers, to send high-volume phishing attacks, host infrastructure for scams and facilitate fraud such as business email compromise.
Microsoft customers were among those impacted by RedVDS’s tools and services.
“Since September 2025, RedVDS‑enabled attacks have led to the compromise or fraudulent access of more than 191,000 Microsoft email accounts across over 130,000 organizations worldwide,” Masada said in the blog post. “These figures represent only a subset of the impacted accounts across all technology providers, illustrating how quickly this infrastructure increases the scale of cyberattacks.”
Over the course of a month, more than 2,600 RedVDS virtual machines sent Microsoft customers an average of one million phishing messages per day, Masada added.
RedVDS facilitated payment diversion fraud against organizations like H2 Pharma and the Gatehouse Dock Condominium Association through business email compromise. The marketplace was also used to compromise the accounts of realtors, escrow agents and title companies to divert payments, according to Microsoft.
More than 9,000 customers, many in Canada and Australia, were directly impacted by real estate-related fraud aided by RedVDS. Microsoft Threat Intelligence said other scams enabled by RedVDS hit organizations in construction, manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, education and legal services.
Researchers said the marketplace’s user interface was loaded with features that allowed eager cybercriminals to purchase unlicensed and inexpensive Windows-based remote desktop protocol servers with full administrator control. RedVDS reused a single, cloned Windows host image across the service, which allowed researchers to find unique technical fingerprints.
The group that develops and operates RedVDS is tracked by Microsoft as Storm-2470. At least five additional cybercrime groups and cybercriminals who used the Racoon0365 phishing service prior to its takedown in October were also using RedVDS infrastructure, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
RedVDS’s site first launched in 2019 and has remained in operation since providing servers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The marketplace “has become a prolific tool for cybercriminals in the past year, facilitating thousands of attacks, including credential theft, account takeovers and mass phishing,” researchers said in a report.
RedVDS rented servers from third-party hosting providers, including at least five hosting companies in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France and the Netherlands. This allowed RedVDS to provision IP addresses in geolocations close to targets, allowing cybercriminals to evade location-based security filters and blend in with normal data center traffic, researchers added.
“Cybercrime today is powered by shared infrastructure, which means disrupting individual attackers is not enough,” Masada said. “Through this coordinated action, Microsoft has disrupted RedVDS’s operations, including seizing two domains that host the RedVDS marketplace and customer portal, while also laying the groundwork to identify the individuals behind them.”
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An independent forensic investigation is underway to determine the extent of the intrusion into customer management software Gainsight’s systems and whether the breach has spread beyond Salesforce to other third-party applications. Despite this ongoing analysis, the company maintains that the impact on customer data stored within connected services is limited and largely contained.
“While Salesforce has identified compromised customer tokens, we presently know of only a handful of customers who had their data affected,” Gainsight CEO Chuck Ganapathi wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Salesforce has notified the affected customers and we have reached out to each of them to provide support and are working directly with them.”
Details about the attack are scattered, and discrepancies remain about the number of companies impacted and the extent to which they are compromised. Information is fragmented, in part, because Gainsight and Salesforce are sharing updates independent of each other and respective to their own systems.
Gainsight is relying on Salesforce and Mandiant, its incident response firm, to identify victims of the attack and provide detailed indicators of compromise.
Salesforce identified three impacted customers in the immediate aftermath of the attack, and has since found more confirmed victims, Gainsight said in an update on its community page. Neither company has provided a specific number of known victims.
“There is a distinction between the number of customers who Salesforce identified as having compromised tokens and the handful of customers we presently know had their data affected,” a company spokesperson told CyberScoop Tuesday.
Google Threat Intelligence Group, which is affiliated with Mandiant under Google Cloud’s security apparatus, said it was aware of more than 200 Salesforce instances potentially affected by the Gainsight breach last week. Google hasn’t provided an updated figure since then.
Inconsistencies are common in supply-chain attacks that flow downstream.
Meanwhile, Mandiant is continuing to sift through logs and analyze token behavior and connector activity to provide Gainsight with a more complete view of what occurred and how far attackers were able to use Gainsight customers’ access tokens to breach additional systems.
Gainsight previously said Hubspot, Zendesk and revenue intelligence platform Gong.io also temporarily revoked Gainsight customers’ access tokens “out of an abundance of caution.” The company hasn’t reported any confirmed impact on other systems and Salesforce maintains that the issue did not involve a vulnerability in the Salesforce platform.
The breach and its root cause is strikingly similar to an expansive downstream attack spree that impacted more than 700 customers who integrated Salesloft Drift into Salesforce two months ago.
While Gainsight and Salesforce are both communicating directly with customers, publicly available threat hunting guidance and information about the attacks exist in multiple places.
Salesforce has shared the most comprehensive IOCs, including dates and observed activities for each malicious IP address. The earliest malicious activity linked to the campaign occurred Oct. 23, according to Salesforce.
The company advised customers to review all available logs for potential compromise and noted that the revocation of Gainsight OAuth tokens does not delete a customers’ logs or hinder their ability to investigate the incident.
Gainsight, however, said its logs are of less use. “Based on the nature of the logs we retain, many of our clients have not found them to be material in assessing any risk to their organization,” Brent Krempges, chief customer officer at Gainsight, said on its community page.
“We strongly recommend that you focus your investigation on the Salesforce logs that show authentication attempts and API calls originating from the Gainsight Connected App,” he added. “These Salesforce-side logs are the authoritative source of information for identifying any anomalous access patterns.”
Gainsight also recommended that customers configure IP restrictions for API calls to ensure only legitimate requests are allowed. This security control is manual and requires cooperation from every vendor in the supply chain. Okta said IP restrictions kept its Drift integrations secure and successfully blocked an attempted attack on its Salesforce environment during the widespread incidents in August.
Ganapathi, who was named CEO in August, acknowledged that Gainsight is critical to its customers’ daily operations and said the company is personally responsible for ensuring access to its products. The company is helping customers manage their Gainsight Customer Success (CS) instances while its Salesforce connected app is offline, he said.
“The only way we beat these threats is by working together and sharing information and strategies,” Ganapathi said. “That is why I am committing to sharing what we learn from this experience to help everyone in the SaaS community strengthen their defenses and, we hope, avoid going through something similar themselves.”
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Security researchers and authorities are warning about a fresh wave of supply-chain attacks linked to a self-replicating worm that attackers have injected into almost 500 npm (node.js package manager) software packages, exposing more than 26,000 open-source repositories on GitHub.
The trojanized npm packages, which were first discovered late Sunday by Charlie Eriksen, security researcher at Aikido Security, were uploaded during a three-day period starting Friday and reference a new version of Shai-Hulud, malware that previously infected npm packages in September.
The campaign remains active and is compromising additional repositories, while others have been removed. Researchers haven’t observed downstream attacks originating from credentials stolen by the malware.
“However, because these credentials were publicly exposed on GitHub, it is highly likely that multiple threat actors already have access to them or will soon. This significantly increases the probability of downstream exploitation even if it has not yet appeared at scale,” Eriksen told CyberScoop.
The malware is propagating rapidly, using stolen npm tokens to infect additional packages at a level of automation and scale that is substantially higher than its previous version, approaching near self-sufficiency, Eriksen added.
Major packages including Zapier, ENS Domains, PostHog and Postman were trojanized, allowing the attackers to populate GitHub repositories with stolen victim data, according to Wiz. Some of the packages are present in about 27% of cloud and code environments, the security firm said in a blog post Monday.
“We’ve observed multiple environments where these trojanized packages were downloaded before their removal from npm, suggesting active real-world exposure,” Merav Bar, threat researcher at Wiz, told CyberScoop. “As we saw in past attacks, we expect to see a long tail of exploitation of the exposure across both the initial and opportunistic attackers.”
The previous and current wave of Shai-Hulud attacks appear to be focused on stealing developer secrets that can be used for deeper supply-chain compromise, Bar added.
“Both waves of Shai-Hulud show how easy it is for attackers to weaponize trusted distribution paths, push malicious versions at scale, and reach thousands of downstream developers before anyone realizes something is wrong,” she said.
The timing of the latest Shai-Hulud campaign was opportunistic as well, hitting repositories just weeks before npm, a company GitHub acquired in 2020, plans to revoke classic tokens as part of a push to institute more strict security practices broadly. “This campaign would be significantly limited if these security implementations were in place,” Eriksen said.
The latest variant of Shai-Hulud creates malicious files during the preinstall phase, including a randomly named public repository containing stolen data. While the attacker references Shai-Hulud and activities resemble the previous worm, researchers at Wiz said there are some differences and attribution has not been fully confirmed.
Ron Peled, chief operating officer and co-founder of Sola Security, described npm as a low-friction package ecosystem, which makes it an appealing target for attackers. Moreover, he said, developers’ endpoints and CI/CD environments are often a blind spot for endpoint detection and response and anti-malware tools.
“Developers often store GitHub tokens, npm tokens or cloud secrets in environment variables,” Peled said. “Build systems almost always have access to powerful tokens and the malware only needs one of them to propagate.”
Attackers target open-source software for supply-chain attacks frequently, and the latest campaign marks yet another attack specifically targeting npm. Attacks are gaining maturity and complexity, building upon previous success, said Melissa Bischoping, senior director of security and product design research at Tanium.
“Last year, everyone zeroed in on the XZ Utils compromise and how supply-chain compromise of a single open-source project could potentially hijack the entire world. In early September we had simple cryptojacking which was mostly a non-issue, but then that was quickly followed by the Shai-Hulud worm which stole credentials and further compromised security,” she added.
“The pattern emerging is that attackers have identified open-source developers as high-value targets and have had massive success in just the last year,” Bischoping said. “Developers, even hobbyist ones, need to be prepared for continued attacks and escalation.”
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