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Malicious MAL-2026-14371 GHSA-wg38-qj68-8g87

chai-as-testkit

npm package · versions 2.3.5

Reported Aug 23, 2026 · Updated Sep 9, 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 (0bf8ab4a811449bd1ba40c637a0eebc0569994d3a3550cf7156c36192abcec31)
The package is published as 'chai-as-testkit' with a description referencing vulnerability management, but the tarball ships pino's README, docs/, index.d.ts, and lib/ tree (proto, levels, transport, worker, redaction) under an unrelated author (Robert King <hello@jsonspack.com>, bugs.url jsonspack.com) rather than the real pinojs publisher. The shipped index.js is a synthetic stub whose only effect is `const config = require('./lib/config')`, and lib/config.js is a 4,083,409-byte single-line obfuscator.io-style bundle: a rotated hex-escaped string array of ~23,953 entries with control-flow flattening and dead-code layers (webcrack inlines 40,105 decoded strings across the decoder layers before failing to serialize). This blob runs immediately when any consumer imports the package, executing attacker-controlled code inside the developer or CI Node.js process. The pino impersonation is the social-engineering wrapper around an on-import loader; the shape (name/description/author mismatch + hollow main entry that delegates to a multi-megabyte obfuscated module at require time) is a typosquat-delivered install/import-time RCE vehicle rather than a logging library.

Source: ghsa-malware (95d5d039dd1913413212411db396e7f1124bf58910447548638c505a05a0e21a)
Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.