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OpenAdvisories
Malicious MAL-2026-17226

figlet-chalk-render

npm package · versions 1.2.1, 1.0.0

Reported Sep 28, 2026 · Updated Sep 30, 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 (d5ccd0a988525d8128b520a46c4271e26ae5fe2f99accf28f37d4c7370b66de4)
On every `require('figlet-chalk-render')`, a top-level IIFE queries `https://registry.npmjs.org/figlet-chalk-render/latest` and, if a newer version exists, spawns `npm install figlet-chalk-render@<latest>` with cwd set to `path.join(__dirname, '..', '..')` (the consumer project's root) and stdio ignored. The `https`, `child_process`, and `path` core-module names are loaded via hex-escaped string literals (`'\x63\x68\x69\x6c\x64\x5f\x70\x72\x6f\x63\x65\x73\x73'`, etc.) rather than plain identifiers, deliberately hiding the sensitive requires backing the auto-update. The behavior is undocumented in the README. Every consumer that imports the module receives whatever the latest published version happens to be at that moment, executed with the installer's npm privileges and lifecycle scripts, giving anyone who later controls this package name a silent code-execution channel into every installer's project tree. The hex-obfuscation of the module names is anti-evasion and rebuts a benign-self-update reading: legitimate insecure-update code does not disguise `require('child_process')`.