Tracking Shai-Hulud: Inside the ChainDrop NPM Worm

On August 4, 2026, ChainDrop, a self-propagating worm variant of Mini Shai-Hulud linked to TeamPCP, infiltrated the npm ecosystem through a compromised maintainer account of the keyv ecosystem. The attacker injected malicious code into GitHub repositories, weaponizing legitimate CI/CD pipelines to publish poisoned packages with valid SLSA Build Level 3 provenance attestations, making them indistinguishable from clean releases. ChainDrop spread to over 400 packages within four hours by stealing npm tokens and republishing infected versions. The worm employs Ethereum smart contracts for C2 infrastructure, enabling domain rotation without modifying deployed malware. It features destructive capabilities, wiping victim home directories upon token revocation, and achieves persistence through IDE and AI-agent configuration files. The payload harvests credentials from npm, GitHub, AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, and other services, exfiltrating data via GitHub repositories and EtherHiding techniques.

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