An ongoing npm malware campaign involving the ‘indexed-btree’ package shows how threat actors bypass supply chain defenses by hiding malicious code in a package’s normal runtime behavior rather than in installation scripts.

The package, spotted by Checkmarx researchers, attempts to impersonate the legitimate ‘sorted-btree’ library and has already amassed 2 million weekly downloads.

The campaign may also have generated significant profits for the attackers, who, according to Checkmarx, use a wallet holding 109 ETH. However, the report does not say those funds came from cryptocurrency theft.

Bypassing latest security measures

In June 2026, GitHub announced a set of npm security measures designed to help prevent supply chain attacks that have shaken open-source ecosystems repeatedly since late 2025.

One key security measure is to block dependency lifecycle scripts such as ‘preinstall’, ‘install ‘, and ‘postinstall,’ unless explicitly approved.

Other measures prevent npm from automatically retrieving dependencies from Git repositories or remote URLs without permission.

The malicious indexed-btree package sidesteps these protections by avoiding installation scripts and instead hiding its loader in the package’s BTree.prototype.set() method, which executes at runtime when the application calls it with a specific key value.

As a result, installation appears clean and triggers none of npm v12’s approval mechanisms.

“The malware loader hides inside the library’s own BTree.prototype.set method, which is the main function that every user would call constantly,” explains Checkmarx.

“This triggers the sharedLoad.min.js, which contains the obfuscated first stage of the malware. This is a well-built way to sneak past standard taint-analysis tools and most static scanners.”

Once the malware is executed, it can collect system details, including architecture, hostname, CPU, memory, and uptime, and exfiltrate the information through hardcoded Slack and Telegram channels.

The malware also polls an Ethereum smart contract on the Sepolia test network for command-and-control (C2) information. It uses X25519 key exchange to derive an AES key and decrypt a second-stage payload stored in the contract.

When the operators choose to end the attack, the malware can delete its files and remove the malicious trigger from the package code to wipe its traces.

The researchers note that the threat actors have gone to great lengths to make the project appear legitimate, including building a legitimate-looking GitHub repository, populating its commit history, and curating the developer account.

Checkmarx also discovered nine additional npm packages linked to the same operation, which it has now removed from npm. Those also achieved significant download numbers, as seen here:

1. ordered-kv-index (448,184 downloads)
2. btree-leaderboard (493,685 downloads)
3. priority-slot-queue (402,860 downloads)
4. btree-range-store (468,092 downloads)
5. btree-core (1,951,274 downloads)
6. btree-time-index (425,312 downloads)
7. btree-lru-cache (372,185 downloads)
8. neighbor-key-map (366,019 downloads)
9. sliding-score-window (448,024 downloads)

Developers are advised not to rely on install-time scanning alone, and to also employ runtime behavioral analysis.

Those who installed indexed-btree or any of the above-listed packages should rotate all secrets and restore their development environment from a safe backup.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

Save your seat

Pavlo Bazilinskyy still can’t believe he was on PornHub for work. He’s an assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and has spent more than a decade researching AI-driven interactions between humans and robots. But he found himself typing “public transport” into the search bar of a very specific website’s “amateur section.” 297 hits.

“People are hard to predict,” Bazilinskyy says. It’s why he researches what he does. So his prurient pursuit had a point. Robotaxis without cabbies behind the wheel have started picking up passengers in a handful of countries, including the US. Meanwhile, there’s a long history of people getting up to antisocial behavior inside the quasi-private or straight-up public spaces of trains, planes, and automobiles—think the prom night limo, the “Mile High Club,” Tom Cruise in slow motion aboard the Chicago L in Risky Business, the stuff he found on PornHub.

What might riders do when there’s no authority figure inside a vehicle to say, “Hey, stop that!”? What do they do? Can people be convinced to stop before they start?

This week, Bazilinskyy and academic colleagues with backgrounds in systems engineering, computer science, psychology, and tourism studies are hosting an industry workshop asking participants to brainstorm along those very lines: How do you stop people from doing it in self-driving cars? Thinking about sex in autonomous vehicles, they theorize, can let anyone who cares about the future of mobility “stress-test” the role the vehicles might eventually play as communal spaces, where social norms get acted out every day.

The event focuses on prevention not just because these academics are no fun (though Alexandros Rouchitsas, an engineering psychologist who is also hosting the event, admits they are “taking the side of the parents, the elderly—we are not the cool people here”). They don’t want people to have sex in self-driving cars because they’re worried it will give a potentially positive technology a really bad rep.

“We want to see automated mobility solutions accepted, trusted by the general public,” Rouchitsas says. Self-driving could have huge upsides for the elderly, children, and people with disabilities, who have a harder time getting around places where driving is quicker and sometimes necessary. The tech might eventually move beyond private taxis and into public transit, where all sorts of people should be able to travel safely and comfortably. “We want automated mobility solutions to be seen as something that is equitable, serious, societally minded,” he says.

Rouchitsas’ biggest fear is that self-driving gets co-opted by the partiers, the drug users, the sort of hedonistic folk who have descended on some islands of his native Greece. “You know ‘Bang Bus’?” he says. “We don’t want that.”

The four-hour workshop—rise and shine, it starts at 8:30 am—is part of an industry conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, focusing on how people interact with vehicles and larger mobility systems. The organizers expect participants from academia but also the wider industry. (Gothenburg is home to Volvo Cars and the tech supplier SmartEye; BMW and Google are conference sponsors.) Those who show up will be prompted to come up with physical and design interventions that encourage people to not do that. The workshop will focus on preventing consensual interactions, its organizers say.

Rouchitsas, who studies human-machine interactions, says he hopes participants will get creative with their anti-action designs. But just off the top of his head: Maybe the vehicles could be transparent? Maybe a light begins to blink if the technology senses behavior it disapproves of? The organizers intend to publish a paper based on the workshop’s results.

Sex is the fun, eye-catching part here, made all the more alluring because it’s “the elephant in the room” for those thinking about how humans might interact with machines in the future, says Bazilinskyy—very under-studied. But the results of this sort of inquiry could help designers, companies, and lawmakers figure out how to compel people to safely share communal spaces like public self-driving buses in the future.

Prevent sex and maybe you’ll also prevent robbery, bullying, and homicide. “It could be helpful for the industry and academics to use this example to design other things,” he says.

There’s a frightening new digital threat that Android users should be aware of. New AI-powered malware called RatHat can automatically gain admin-level control over your Android device, stealing whatever it wants.

RatHat was discovered by mobile security firm Zimperium, which notes that the program tricks people into downloading what appears to be a legitimate app, such as Google Chrome, via a fake web page that mimics the Google Play Store. Once opened, the app seemingly innocently asks for accessibility permissions, which it then uses to take over your entire device. 

RatHat uses the accessibility permissions users grant it to navigate your phone’s menu system and unlock Wireless Debugging, a legitimate developer tool commonly used in app testing, then grants itself ADB Shell permissions. This effectively grants the malware admin access to your device. Next, RatHat installs an AI-assisted agent that runs system commands to steal information and a proxy client that tunnels that stolen information back to the hacker. 

“That sort of infection chain isn’t necessarily more complex than, say, following a phishing email on Windows and saying yes when the program asks for administrator permissions,” Sav Wheeler, a research engineer for Malwarebytes, said in an email. “Escalation in the Android landscape often relies on granting apps additional permissions that the OS locks away by default to keep the devices secure.”

Per Zimperium, the malware can be traced to attackers in China and primarily targets apps like WeChat Pay and Alipay, which are as popular in China as Apple Pay and Venmo are in the US. Malwarebytes notes that other financial apps can also be targeted. So far, researchers have found 162 infected apps in the wild, which report back to a dozen servers run by attackers. 

What can this malware do?

The worrisome part is that the malware doesn’t do anything wonky the user would notice immediately, unlike with a ransomware attack. Instead, it bides its time, runs in the background, and captures information that appears on the screen, including usernames, passwords and two-factor authentication codes. 

It can also steal raw touch input from your touchscreen, allowing it to recreate PIN codes and pattern unlock codes. It can capture SMS messages, too, thereby intercepting security codes. There isn’t much that the app can’t steal if it wants to.

How can I find out if I have RatHat on my phone?

The only way to find it is to run an antivirus scan that detects the software. Malwarebytes is a free option on Google Play that can do this. Wheeler told CNET that it can detect the malware pretty easily, which is good news for anyone who’s worried about whether or not they have it. 

The bad news is that RatHat is sneaky and difficult to quarantine. 

“Unfortunately, because of the behavior of the program itself — remasquerading as other apps, dynamically changing its behavior using the AI endpoint — static analysis and quarantining is not enough to remove the malware,” Wheeler said. 

In short, the only way to actually get rid of this malware is a complete factory reset of your device. This effectively removes the hidden secondary files the malware installs, which antivirus apps can’t deal with. Uninstalling the app doesn’t work because the malware retains its admin access through those hidden files, which then let it reinstall the app over and over again. 

How do I avoid RatHat?

This is also good news. RatHat’s infection method is complex and can be thwarted at multiple points during the process. First, you should never click a link from an SMS or email from a source you don’t know or trust. That stops almost all social engineering threats right out of the gate, including RatHat. Verify that you’re using the official Google Play app rather than a deceptive imitation website. Look at the top of the screen. If it has an address bar where you type URLs, it’s just a website disguised as an app. Real apps do not have address bars.

Also, note that preinstalled or existing versions of Chrome do not require reinstallation, so if you’re being asked to reinstall an app you know you have, think twice.

Denying accessibility permissions is the critical final line of defense against mobile malware. While downloading a malicious application is risky, the software remains largely powerless until you grant it advanced system privileges.

Wheeler says that SMS phishing is targeted to each specific user, so you won’t see the same phishing attempt as another person, and the tactics the app uses vary from region to region. Following standard antiphishing practices and not enabling accessibility permissions largely removes the threat of RatHat. 

Joe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a long-running affection for building his own PCs, which he did for the first time as a teenager. It evolved into a lifelong enjoyment of putting words on the internet about the subject. He’s written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable and SlashGear as a freelance writer, and worked as a Senior Editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he’s not writing about tech and science, he’s learning the ins and outs of DIY home repair, gaming, playing his bass guitars and posting help on PC building and gaming subreddits. He is a staunch believer that orange juice should have pulp.

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