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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

The Node Package Manager (npm) team avoided a disaster today when it discovered and blocked the distribution of a cleverly hidden backdoor mechanism inside a popular —albeit deprecated— JavaScript package.

The actual backdoor mechanism was found in "getcookies," a relatively newly created npm package (JavaScript library) for working with browser cookies.

The npm team —who analyzed this package earlier today after reports from the npm community— says "getcookies" contains a complex system for receiving commands from a remote attacker, who could target any JavaScript app that had incorporated this library. The npm team explains:

The backdoor worked by parsing the user-supplied HTTP request.headers, looking for specifically formatted data that provides three different commands to the backdoor. [...] We can see here that the headers are stringified and the result searched for values in the format of: gCOMMANDhDATAi

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/somebody-tried-to-hide-a-backdoor-in-a-popular-javascript-npm-package/

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