MAL-2026-17893 Malicious code in buyerdashboard (npm)

[email protected] describes itself as "User dashboard IP info". Its preinstall hook runs node index.js on npm install and requests https://realwbx.com/ip.php?ip=8.8.8.8 with the hardcoded Authorization value 8eb5e8641a5795b022d68e14d8858415, which differs from the value in each of the account's other packages. The npm account conx3993 published it on 2026-10-15, one of 9 packages from that account between 2026-09-30 and 2026-10-15 whose preinstall hook calls realwbx.com.

buyerdashboard 45.3.4 declares preinstall: node index.js in package.json. On npm install, index.js issues an HTTPS GET at module top level to realwbx.com/ip.php with a hardcoded Authorization header value 8eb5e8641a5795b022d68e14d8858415. The beacon fires automatically and discloses to realwbx.com that the package was installed, the public source IP of the installing host or CI runner, and any request metadata the server chooses to log, correlated by the hardcoded token. realwbx.com is not a documented first-party service for this package, the README is a one-liner, and there is no opt-in or configuration surface. The manifest additionally pins a runtime dependency literally named https at ^1.0.0, a confusable-name registry package that shadows the Node core module and whose own install-time code would run alongside this beacon. The package version number (45.3.4) is implausibly high for a one-file package with a near-empty README and is consistent with a dependency-confusion placeholder designed to win internal-name resolution.