Supply Chain Attack on Axios Pulls Malicious Dependency from npm

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: WorkOS — Ready to sell to Enterprise clients? Build and ship securely with WorkOS. Supply Chain Attack on Axios Pulls Malicious Dependency from npm (via) Useful writeup of today's supply chain attack against Axios, the HTTP client NPM package with 101 million weekly downloads. Versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 both included a new dependency called plain-crypto-js which was freshly published malware, stealing credentials and installing a remote access trojan (RAT). It looks like the attack came from a leaked long-lived npm token. Axios have an open issue to adopt trusted publishing, which would ensure that only their GitHub Actions workflows are able to publish to npm. The malware packages were published without an accompanying GitHub release, which strikes me as a useful heuristic for spotting potentially malicious releases - the same pattern was present for LiteLLM last week as well. Posted 31st March 2026 at 11:28 pm Recent articles Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer - 30th March 2026 Vibe coding SwiftUI apps is a lot of fun - 27th March 2026 Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills - 22nd March 2026 This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 31st March 2026. javascript 749 security 587 npm 23 supply-chain 16 Monthly briefing Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments. Pay me to send you less! Sponsor & subscribe Disclosures Colophon © 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026