Foxconn, a critical supplier for major hardware companies like Apple and Nvidia, on Tuesday confirmed a cyberattack affecting its North American operations after the Nitrogen ransomware gang listed the electronics manufacturer on its data leak site. “Some of Foxconn's factories in North America suffered a cyberattack,” a Foxconn spokesperson told The Register. “The cybersecurity team immediately activated the response mechanism and implemented multiple operational measures to ensure the continuity of production and delivery. The affected factories are currently resuming normal production.” Nitrogen ransomware criminals on Monday claimed to have breached the Taiwan-based company and stolen 8 TB of data comprising more than 11 million files. The miscreants say the leaks include confidential instructions, internal project documentation, and technical drawings related to projects at Intel, Apple, Google, Dell, and Nvidia, among others. Foxconn declined to confirm that these - or any - customers’ information was hoovered up in the digital intrusion. Nitrogen, which has been around since 2023, is believed to be one of the various ransomware offshoots that borrowed code from the leaked Conti 2 builder. And, in what may be very bad news for its latest victim, even paying the ransom demand may not guarantee recovery of encrypted files. In February, Coveware researchers warned that a programming error prevents the gang's decryptor from recovering victims' files, so paying up is futile. The finding specifically concerns the group's malware that targets VMware ESXi. This isn’t the first time Foxconn has been targeted by ransomware gangs. In 2024, LockBit claimed to have infected Foxsemicon Integrated Technology, a semiconductor equipment manufacturer within the Foxconn Technology Group. The same criminal crew also hit a Foxconn subsidiary in Mexico in 2022. ®

An attacker has published 84 malicious versions of official TanStack npm packages, with the impact including credential theft, self-propagation, and complete disk wipe of an infected host. The attack is part of a wave of attacks across npm and PyPI, continuing the Mini Shai-Hulud campaign. Supply chain security company Socket reports that other compromised packages include the OpenSearch client, Mistral AI, UiPath, and Guardrails AI. Malicious npm packages for TanStack, an open source application stack, were published between 19:20 and 19:26 UTC on May 11. The attack was detected and reported within 30 minutes by StepSecurity, triggering incident response and npm deprecation. GitHub published a security advisory at 21:30 UTC, including a list of affected packages. TanStack founder Tanner Linsley published a postmortem describing how the attacker used a malicious commit on a fork to create a pull request on the TanStack repository, causing scripts to auto-run and build the malware. This poisoned the GitHub Actions cache in what Linsley said is a variant of a known GitHub Action vulnerability discovered in 2024. The malware then extracted the npm OpenID Connect (OIDC) token, used for trusted npm publishing, from runner memory using the same code used to compromise tj-actions in an attack last year. No TanStack maintainers were compromised. StepSecurity has a detailed analysis of the attack, noting that the payload "reads files from over 100 hardcoded paths" including those that may contain cloud credentials, SSH (secure shell) keys, developer tool configuration files, crypto wallets, VPN configurations, messaging credentials, and shell history. Shell history may contain tokens and passwords pasted into the terminal. Security researcher Nicholas Carlini warned the payload "installs a dead-man's switch… as a system user service." The service checks whether a stolen GitHub token has been revoked and, if it has, runs a command to wipe the local disk completely. Socket's write-up includes recommended actions such as rotating all secrets on any affected system. GitHub's advisory suggests "any developer or CI environment that ran npm install, pnpm install, or yarn install against an affected version on 2026-05-11 should be considered compromised." The Mistral AI has also been reported on GitHub, and at the time of writing, the Mistral AI project is quarantined on PyPI. This attack is still evolving and will likely have a far-reaching impact. It confirms again that running everyday commands like npm install is unsafe, that for all their efforts major package repositories including npm and PyPI are still not secured, and that software development is now best done in isolated, ephemeral environments. ®