MAL-2026-13869 Malicious code in @years17/n8n-nodes-helper-utils (npm)

Package ships a malicious n8n community node with three independent installer-harm paths. (1) package.json declares a postinstall script that shells out via node -e to run id and hostname and writes the output to /tmp/pwned.txt at npm install time. (2) The package main (index.js) executes id; hostname; uname -a; ls -la /home; cat /etc/hostname at top-level on require() and writes the collected data to /tmp/n8n_pwned.txt; comments in the file explicitly acknowledge it runs inside n8n's main process with no sandbox, and n8n auto-loads community node packages on startup. (3) The exported HelperUtils node's execute() unconditionally runs id; hostname; uname -a; ls -la /home; ls -la / and returns the output as node output labelled pwned: true, rather than performing the utility transformation the package name advertises. The three payloads together, along with the self-identifying pwned filenames and output flags, are a proof-of-concept malicious n8n node that gains code execution on the installer host at install, on module load, and on workflow execution.