MAL-2026-17509 Malicious code in hardhat-roof (npm)

Malicious package Published
Package
hardhat-roof
Registry
npm

What is MAL-2026-17509?

MAL-2026-17509 is a malicious package in hardhat-roof, published on 4 Oct 2026.

Official description

The package presents itself as the pino logger — README, docs/, index.d.ts and LICENSE are copied from pinojs/pino and keywords advertise 'fast, logger, stream, json' — but the package name is 'hardhat-roof', the description references unrelated vulnerability-management functionality, and the author points to jsonspack.com rather than the pino maintainers. The top of index.js executes require('./lib/config'), which loads lib/config.js: a 4,373,384-byte file containing obfuscator.io-style string-array obfuscation with a self-rotating decoder (n['push'](n['shift']()) loop gated by a parseInt sum), hex-escaped character lookups, and dozens of single-letter indirection functions. The remaining lib/ files are small and consistent with pino; only config.js is the oversized opaque blob, and the real pino has no such file. Any consumer that imports or requires this package therefore executes several megabytes of opaque code in-process at load time. The combination of a doppelganger cover story cloned from a popular logger, a mismatched package name and author, and a reachable load-time execution path into a heavily obfuscated multi-megabyte payload is the shape of a trojanized typosquat/doppelganger delivering attacker-controlled code into installer processes.

What should I do about MAL-2026-17509?

Remove the package from your dependencies and lockfiles, then rotate any secrets on machines where it was installed.

Sources

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