MAL-2026-17661 Malicious code in hardhat-pack (npm)
Malicious package
Published
MAL-2026-17661 is a malicious package: hardhat-pack (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-2026-17661/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/MAL-2026-17661/index.md)
- Package
- hardhat-pack
- Registry
- npm
What is MAL-2026-17661?
MAL-2026-17661 is a malicious package in hardhat-pack, published on 8 Oct 2026.
Official description
The package is published as
hardhat-pack, a name shape that resembles the Hardhat Ethereum tooling ecosystem, but its README, LICENSE, TypeScript declarations and library source are copied verbatim from the unrelated pino logger. The only material divergence from upstream pino is that index.js adds const config = require('./lib/config'); at the top level, and lib/config.js is a single-line 4.4MB obfuscator.io payload: an IIFE with a ~26,000-entry hex-escaped string array and a rotating decoder. Nothing in the shipped source references config for a legitimate purpose, and the package carries no native build, no vendored SDK, and no other justification for a multi-megabyte opaque blob. The package also declares axios as a runtime dependency, consistent with network exfiltration or remote fetch from inside the decoded payload. Any process that imports hardhat-pack hands the opaque payload to the JavaScript engine on first require.What should I do about MAL-2026-17661?
Remove the package from your dependencies and lockfiles, then rotate any secrets on machines where it was installed.