Details
Part of the "Mini Shai-Hulud" supply chain worm campaign that compromised the GitHub Actions OIDC trusted publisher shared by Red Hat Cloud Services npm packages. The attacker injected a `preinstall` hook into this and 31 other packages in the `@redhat-cloud-services` scope. The hook delivers a three-layer obfuscated payload (ROT-9 Caesar cipher over a 1.27M-entry character-code array -> AES-128-GCM decryption with hardcoded keys -> stacked obfuscator.io encoding with PBKDF2+SHA-256 keystream S-box substitution) that downloads a pinned Bun runtime (v1.3.13) from GitHub to execute the worm outside the victim's Node installation.
**Credential theft:** Harvests AWS credentials (IMDS, ECS, Secrets Manager, SSM), Azure managed identities, GCP service account tokens, HashiCorp Vault tokens, Kubernetes service account tokens (`/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token`), GitHub PATs, npm publish tokens, environment variables from ~40 CI platforms (CircleCI, Travis CI, Jenkins, and others), password manager stores (Bitwarden, gopass), and local files (`~/.npmrc`, `~/.netrc`, shell history, database history). Collected data is exfiltrated to attacker-controlled public GitHub repositories.
**Privilege escalation:** Exploits Docker socket access to escape containers and modify `/etc/sudoers.d`, granting passwordless sudo to CI runner user accounts.
**Self-propagation:** Uses stolen npm credentials to republish tampered tarballs of target packages. Injects a malicious CodeQL workflow into accessible GitHub repositories via the GraphQL `createCommitOnBranch` mutation, exchanges GitHub Actions OIDC tokens for npm publish tokens, and signs the resulting artifacts through Sigstore (Fulcio/Rekor) to appear legitimate.
**Persistence and evasion:** Installs a daemon at `/tmp/kitty-<random>`, hijacks `.claude/settings.json` for AI agent persistence, and hijacks `.vscode/tasks.json` for editor task execution. Detects sandbox environments via `__FAKE_PLATFORM__`, `TESTING_TAR_FAKE_PLATFORM__`, and `__IS_DAEMON` environment variables, and probes for EDR tools (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Carbon Black, StepSecurity Harden-Runner).