MAL-2026-11763 Malicious code in @ornikar/lerna-config (npm)

npm/@ornikar/lerna-config is affected by the large-scale, self-propagating npm supply-chain worm of 2026-08-04 (the "Shai-Hulud: Here We Go Again" wave) — the same campaign that began with the compromise of the keyv and cacheable maintainer account. The listed version(s) were trojanized and republished by the worm after it reached an npm publish token belonging to a maintainer in this namespace; the payload enumerates every package a stolen token controls and republishes each with the same hook, so many packages under this scope were poisoned in the same short window. Every poisoned release adds a preinstall hook ("preinstall": "node setup.mjs") that runs on a bare npm install, before any project code. setup.mjs downloads a standalone Bun runtime and runs a byte-identical, heavily obfuscated ~728 KB second-stage credential stealer (shipped as Math_Symbol.js / math_init.js). It harvests GitHub, npm, AWS, GCP, Azure, HashiCorp Vault and Kubernetes credentials plus generic secrets and private keys (TruffleHog-style sweep), reads CI/CD secrets and identifies build runners, then republishes further packages the stolen token can reach. Rather than a fixed command-and-control host, it exfiltrates stolen findings to attacker-created GitHub repositories (descriptions reading "Shai-Hulud: Here We Go Again") and over DNS. Treat any environment that installed an affected version (with install scripts enabled) as compromised: rotate and revoke all reachable credentials (npm and GitHub tokens, cloud keys, Vault/Kubernetes secrets, and CI org/repo secrets). Part of the August 2026 npm worm that poisoned 400+ packages across many organizations.

The package declares a preinstall lifecycle script (node setup.mjs) that automatically runs on npm install. setup.mjs is itself obfuscated with hex-mangled identifiers and proxy-object string maps; it detects platform/libc (musl via ldd --version and /etc/os-release), downloads a pinned Bun release archive from github.com/oven-sh/bun to a temporary directory, extracts the platform-specific bun binary (with a hand-rolled ZIP inflater fallback), chmods it 0o755, and execFileSyncs it against the sibling math_init.js. math_init.js is a 727KB @bun @bun-cjs bundle using a rotated numeric string-array decoder (identifiers n7gIxM, WV8StW) — the payload is executed under the smuggled Bun runtime, outside Node's normal load path. The file name math_init.js bears no relationship to the package's stated lerna-configuration purpose, and shipping a Bun runtime plus a large obfuscated bundle is not consistent with a lerna helper. This is the alternate-runtime-dropper pattern: an obfuscated preinstall script fetches an alternate runtime and uses it to execute an obfuscated bundle at install time, yielding user-level code execution on any machine running npm install.

Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.