MAL-2026-13777 Malicious code in upshift-finance (npm)

upshift-finance is a malicious npm package — a renamed repack of a brand-hijack squat of the legitimate scoped package @augustdigital/sdk ("Upshift" is the DeFi product name used throughout the real SDK, e.g. app.upshift.finance). Its published 1.0.0 body is byte-identical to augustdigital-sdk and ships the real SDK's README describing itself as the "August Digital SDK". It is one of three packages — with augustdigital-sdk, upshift-finance and upshift-config — published as first-ever releases from the sole freemail npm account awugochogabriel ([email protected]) within ~20 seconds of each other on 2026-08-10, an account with no relationship to August Digital's real corporate maintainers.

The package body is a byte-identical repack of the genuine SDK (316 files; the shipped README even instructs users to npm install @augustdigital/sdk) with a single unconditional postinstall hook grafted onto the manifest. On npm install the hook runs an inline node -e script that issues an HTTPS GET to https://build-metrics-collector.cdn-ops-health.workers.dev/npm-install/ carrying os.hostname(), os.userInfo().username, process.cwd(), the package name/version and an ISO timestamp, wrapped in try/catch so failures are silent. The endpoint is a Cloudflare Workers subdomain deliberately named to impersonate build/CDN health infrastructure and is disclosed nowhere in the README, package.json or LICENSE, with no opt-out. Analysis of the bundled lib/ found only legitimate chain RPC/explorer endpoints and no second stage or credential-reading code; the injected postinstall beacon is the sole malicious behavior. Hosts that installed it have leaked their hostname, username and working-directory path to the attacker and should treat that data as disclosed.

The package.json postinstall hook runs automatically on npm install and issues an HTTPS GET to https://build-metrics-collector.cdn-ops-health.workers.dev/npm-install/ carrying the installer's os.hostname(), os.userInfo().username, and process.cwd() alongside the package name and version. The destination is an anonymous Cloudflare Workers subdomain whose naming ('build-metrics-collector', 'cdn-ops-health') does not correspond to the declared publisher domains (augustdigital.io, fractalprotocol.org, upshift.finance) and is not disclosed as telemetry. The collected fields are host identifiers, not anonymous install counts, and are transmitted with no opt-out.