June's Sophisticated npm Attack Attributed to North Korea

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Updated 11 March 2025

In June 2023, Phylum was the first to unearth a series of suspicious npm publications belonging to what appeared to be a highly targeted attack. The identified packages, published in pairs, required installation in a specific sequence, subsequently retrieving a token that facilitated the download of a final malicious payload from a remote server. A recent security alert from GitHub publicly attributes this cyber-attack—which they were investigating independently—to threat actors with strong ties to North Korean objectives. The GitHub Security AlertOn July 18, 2023 GitHub posted a security alert on their blog, sharing further insights into this attack, which they had been collaboratively investigating with npm, their subsidiary. They described it as a "low-volume social engineering campaign that targets the personal accounts of employees of technology firms." Additionally, they went on to say the following, We assess with high confidence that this campaign is associated with a group operating in support of North Korean objectives, known as Jade Sleet by Microsoft Threat Intelligence and TraderTraitor by the U.S