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Posted by u/roskoalexey 4 months ago
Malware in PostHog NPM packages
I know many of us use a really excellent PostHog service, but it seems their latest version of `posthog-js` NPM package contains malware.

Reported to their security channel, also reported to NPM, but also wanted to raise awareness here.

Update: It seems all their NPM packages have the same problem

Update 2: https://status.posthog.com/

timgl · 4 months ago
co-founder of PostHog here. It looks like we were also a victim of this attack: https://helixguard.ai/blog/malicious-sha1hulud-2025-11-24

We've rotated keys and passwords, unpublished all affected packages and have pushed new versions, so make sure you're on the latest version of our SDKs.

We're still figuring out how this key got compromised, and we'll follow up with a post-mortem. We'll update status.posthog.com with more updates as well.

Dead Comment

sakce · 4 months ago
Thank you for flagging this - we are actively working on it and will be back with an update!
roskoalexey · 4 months ago
Some more details:

1. Malware uses a "preinstall" NPM script, which is triggered upon you running `npm install`.

2. Malware installs `bun`.

3. Then it installs and starts `trufflehog` (a tool for scanning code for secrets, API keys, passwords, etc.).

nextaccountic · 4 months ago
One more reason to run pnpm. Or better yet, deno
nycalexander · 4 months ago
Made a package (that I needed personally), to easily reinstall all dependencies in a project using Aikido's safe guard for npm, pnpm, bun, and yarn. https://www.npmjs.com/package/eazypm
rvz · 4 months ago
This feels like an impending disaster about to be unraveled in lots of npm packages.

Looking forward to the post-mortem.

roskoalexey · 4 months ago
Also:

It seems many of their other NPM packages also have the same problem. https://www.npmjs.com/~timgl (all published 5 hours ago)

roskoalexey · 4 months ago
Details:

In `package.json`, it has a script `"preinstall": "node setup_bun.js"` + files `setup_bun.js` and `bun_environment.js` which are apparently is the malware.