MAL-2026-12217 Malicious code in tailwind-animate-plugin (npm)
Malicious package
Published
MAL-2026-12217 is a malicious package: tailwind-animate-plugin (npm). Every version was published to cause harm.
Task:
1. Search this repository's dependency manifests and lockfiles for the package, including transitive dependencies.
2. If it is present, remove it, regenerate the lockfile with the project's package manager, and replace whatever it was used for.
3. List any CI runners, developer machines or containers that installed it, so their secrets can be rotated.
4. If the package is not used anywhere, say so and change nothing.
Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/MAL-2026-12217/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/MAL-2026-12217/index.md)
- Package
- tailwind-animate-plugin
- Registry
- npm
What is MAL-2026-12217?
MAL-2026-12217 is a malicious package in tailwind-animate-plugin, published on 5 Aug 2026.
Official description
index.js appends a large base64-encoded, unicode-escaped payload after ~11 KB of whitespace padding, executed via eval(atob('…')) whenever the package is required (main = index.js). The decoded payload queries Ethereum RPC endpoints (eth.blockscout.com/api, 1rpc.io/eth, eth.drpc.org, ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com, eth-mainnet.public.blastapi.io) for transactions from 0xa322E5f3D311D3080e6f0121063e9aDC2490Ef1a, extracts two IPv4 addresses from a tx.to field, then HTTP-GETs http://<resolved-ip>:443/0x/cls and http://<resolved-ip>:443/0x/ls, XOR-decrypts the response, and executes the resulting code via spawn('node', ['-e', payload], {detached: true, stdio: 'ignore', windowsHide: true}).unref(). Sensitive identifiers ('http', 'child_process', 'spawn', 'POST', 'HEAD', 'x-payload-b64', RPC URLs, target address) are stored as \uXXXX escapes to defeat casual scanning. The package presents itself as a Tailwind CSS animation plugin; the dropper is hidden behind the benign plugin body. Any consumer of this package receives arbitrary attacker-controlled code execution on the host at require time, with the C2 host resolvable on-chain and thus resistant to takedown.
What should I do about MAL-2026-12217?
Remove the package from your dependencies and lockfiles, then rotate any secrets on machines where it was installed.