MAL-2026-10941 Malicious code in aftermath-finance (npm)

The aftermath-finance package was published to the npm registry by user 'jet0010001' (maintainer email [email protected]) as part of a dependency-confusion / reconnaissance campaign impersonating the Aftermath Finance SDK (Aftermath Finance is a DeFi protocol on the Sui blockchain). The package was published at version 99.0.0 - an inflated version number characteristic of dependency-confusion attacks, intended to cause a misconfigured resolver to prefer this public lookalike over the intended private/internal dependency of the same name.

The package declares a preinstall hook ("node setup.js || true") that executes automatically at npm install time, before any application code runs. The bundled setup.js performs host reconnaissance and credential harvesting: it collects the machine hostname, the current OS username, the current working directory, the contents of /etc/hostname, and the output of 'git remote -v', and it enumerates process environment variables whose names match the pattern /key|secret|token|pass|auth|private|drone|gitea|sui|admin|deploy/i - capturing API keys, secrets, tokens, passwords, and Sui/deploy/CI credentials. The collected data is serialized to JSON and exfiltrated via an HTTPS POST to the hardcoded attacker-controlled endpoint https://2.25.140.71:8443/aftermath/npm-dep-conf, with TLS certificate verification disabled (rejectUnauthorized: false) so a self-signed listener is accepted. Errors are silently swallowed so the install appears to succeed. The published module code (index.js) is a benign stub exporting only { version: "99.0.0" }, consistent with a package built solely to deliver the install-time beacon.

The install-time payload is byte-for-byte identical across the campaign's packages (aftermath-finance, aftermath-sui, aftermathfi), all published by the same maintainer within seconds of each other and all beaconing to the same collector.

The package's preinstall script (setup.js) enumerates process.env and selects keys matching credential-shaped patterns (key/secret/token/pass/auth/private/drone/gitea/sui/admin/deploy), collects host identity (os.hostname(), os.userInfo().username, process.cwd(), /etc/hostname) and source-repo identifiers (git remote -v), and POSTs the collected data over HTTPS with TLS verification disabled (rejectUnauthorized: false) to the hardcoded bare IPv4 endpoint https://2.25.140.71:8443/aftermath/npm-dep-conf. The behavior fires automatically on npm install via the preinstall lifecycle hook.