A sophisticated supply chain attack has compromised the widely-used Trivy vulnerability scanner, triggering a self-propagating malware campaign that has infected 47 npm packages. The breach, which began on 19th March, exploited hardcoded authentication secrets in Trivy's development pipelines, allowing attackers to distribute malicious code through compromised software versions.
Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury confirmed that all malicious artefacts have been removed from affected registries, with the latest releases now pointing to safe versions. However, the attack has evolved into something far more dangerous. Security researchers have discovered that the attackers deployed a novel worm called CanisterWorm, which represents the first publicly documented abuse of an ICP canister for command-and-control server operations.
The malware operates through a postinstall hook that executes a loader, subsequently dropping a Python backdoor. This backdoor contacts the ICP canister to retrieve URLs for next-stage payloads. To maintain persistence, the malware establishes a systemd user service masquerading as PostgreSQL tooling, configured to automatically restart after a 5-second delay if terminated. The most alarming development is CanisterWorm's ability to self-propagate without manual intervention. Every developer or CI pipeline that installs an infected package with an accessible npm token becomes an unwitting propagation vector, creating a cascading infection cycle.
The attack has compromised 28 packages in the @EmilGroup scope and 16 in the @opengov scope, attributed to the cybercriminal operation known as TeamPCP. The malware thoroughly scours development pipelines for sensitive credentials including GitHub tokens, cloud credentials, SSH keys, and Kubernetes tokens, encrypting and exfiltrating this data to attacker-controlled servers. The breach originated from a separate compromise last month affecting the Aqua Trivy VS Code extension. Whilst maintainers rotated tokens in response, the process wasn't fully atomic, allowing attackers to perform authenticated operations and force-push 75 existing version tags to malicious commits. With Trivy boasting 33,200 GitHub stars, the potential impact on the development community could be severe. Maintainers have since enabled immutable releases and urge anyone running compromised versions to immediately rotate all pipeline secrets.
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