MAL-2026-14194
Malicious code in system-performance-helper (npm)
Details
--- _-= Per source details. Do not edit below this line.=-_
## Source: amazon-inspector (f382b23398f0b2550e29a61c444b8dbd45796d20c938dead6ada9d967d82cabc) Package advertises itself as a system performance monitoring helper, but its package.json declares a postinstall hook (`node install.js`) that opens a TCP socket and pipes a spawned OS shell (`/bin/sh` on Unix, `cmd.exe` on Windows) stdin/stdout/stderr through it, with auto-reconnect and a keep-alive interval — a canonical reverse-shell backdoor executed automatically on `npm install`. Bytes received from the remote peer are written directly into the shell, yielding full remote code execution on the installer's host. The destination is hardcoded as `HOST="YOUR_PUBLIC_IP"`, `PORT=4444`, so as-published the connect() fails DNS resolution and no callback occurs; the payload itself is fully functional and any republish with the placeholder filled in weaponizes every install. The visible exports in index.js (`getLoad`, `getTotalMemory` wrapping `os.loadavg`/`os.totalmem`) are a cover story; install.js contains `// Run silently` and `// Fail quietly` comments around the socket-to-shell pipe, and the advertised monitoring behavior is not present in the postinstall payload.
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Affected packages
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