On May 19, 633 malicious npm package versions passed Sigstore provenance verification. They were cleared by the system because the attacker had generated valid signing certificates from a compromised maintainer account.Sigstore worked exactly as designed: it verified the package was built in a CI environment, confirmed a valid certificate was issued, and recorded everything in the transparency log. What it cannot do is determine whether the person holding the credentials authorized the publish — and that gap turned the last automated trust signal in npm into camouflage.One day earlier, StepSecurity documented an attack on the Nx Console VS Code extension, a widely used developer tool with more than 2.2 million lifetime installs. Version 18.95.0 was published using stolen credentials on May 18 and stayed live for under 40 minutes — but Nx internal telemetry showed approximately 6,000 activations during that window, most through auto-update, compared to just 28 official downloads. The payload harvested Claude Code configuration files, AWS keys, GitHub tokens, npm tokens, 1Password vault contents, and Kubernetes service account tokens.The Mini Shai-Hulud campaign, attributed by multiple researchers to a financially motivated threat actor identified as TeamPCP, hit the npm registry at 01:39 UTC on May 19. Endor Labs detected the initial wave when two dormant packages, jest-canvas-mock and size-sensor, published new versions containing an obfuscated 498KB Bun script — neither had been updated in over three years, making a sudden version with raw GitHub commit hash dependencies a detection signal, but only if the tooling is watching.By 02:06 UTC, the worm had propagated across the @antv data visualization ecosystem and dozens of unscoped packages, including echarts-for-react (~1.1 million weekly downloads). Socket raised the total to 639 compromised versions across 323 unique packages in this wave. Across the ful …
