Skip to content
OpenAdvisories
Malicious MAL-2026-14194 GHSA-fhpw-32cw-j76mSNYK-JS-SYSTEMPERFORMANCEHELPER-19003271

system-performance-helper

npm package · versions 1.0.0, 1.0.1

Reported Aug 19, 2026 · Updated Sep 24, 2026

If this package is installed

Remove it, treat the machine (or CI runner) as compromised, and rotate every secret, token and key it could access — from a different, clean machine.

Details

Source: amazon-inspector (f382b23398f0b2550e29a61c444b8dbd45796d20c938dead6ada9d967d82cabc)
Package advertises itself as a system performance monitoring helper, but its package.json declares a postinstall hook (`node install.js`) that opens a TCP socket and pipes a spawned OS shell (`/bin/sh` on Unix, `cmd.exe` on Windows) stdin/stdout/stderr through it, with auto-reconnect and a keep-alive interval — a canonical reverse-shell backdoor executed automatically on `npm install`. Bytes received from the remote peer are written directly into the shell, yielding full remote code execution on the installer's host. The destination is hardcoded as `HOST="YOUR_PUBLIC_IP"`, `PORT=4444`, so as-published the connect() fails DNS resolution and no callback occurs; the payload itself is fully functional and any republish with the placeholder filled in weaponizes every install. The visible exports in index.js (`getLoad`, `getTotalMemory` wrapping `os.loadavg`/`os.totalmem`) are a cover story; install.js contains `// Run silently` and `// Fail quietly` comments around the socket-to-shell pipe, and the advertised monitoring behavior is not present in the postinstall payload.