MAL-2026-14269 Malicious code in novel-suduko (npm)

The package's postinstall lifecycle script chmods and executes the bundled binary native/hint-linux-amd64 via spawnSync(BIN, [], { stdio: 'inherit' }) on every linux-x64 install, with errors silently swallowed by a try/catch that only console.error's. The README falsely states the postinstall only performs chmod +x and 'executes nothing.' The shipped native/src/hint.go is a ~4 KB self-contained sudoku hint program using only fmt/os/io/bufio/json/strings, which would produce roughly a 2 MB stripped static Go binary; the shipped artifact is 33,976,468 bytes and its string table references facilities absent from the source (chacha8, /proc/self/cgroup, /proc/self/mountinfo, GODEBUG parsing). The declared build:native command in package.json cannot reproduce the shipped artifact from the shipped source. The Go file is a decoy alibi for a much larger opaque native payload that is executed on the installer's machine at npm install time.