Researchers at Island found that a popular Chrome extension, "Adblock for YouTube," with more than 10 million installs and a Featured badge, contains the machinery to run arbitrary JavaScript on any website the user visits. The extension works as advertised, but it can fetch a rule from its server that creates script elements with attacker-supplied content, giving access to page data, sessions, and forms. The capability is dormant, not absent: switching it on takes a single server-side change, with no extension update and no store review. The add-on changed ownership years ago, requests access to all sites, and is linked to other extensions previously pulled for malware.
Researchers at Novee disclosed Cordyceps, a systemic class of weaknesses in CI/CD pipelines, especially GitHub Actions workflows, that lets an attacker with nothing more than a free account hijack a project's build and release process. The danger is not a single bug but how workflows chain together: an untrusted pull request or comment feeds a low-privilege workflow whose output flows into a higher-privilege one, ending in stolen credentials, poisoned artifacts, or malicious releases. A scan of 30,000 repositories found over 300 fully exploitable, with fixes confirmed by Microsoft, Google, Apache, Cloudflare, and the Python Software Foundation. Standard scanners miss it because they check files in isolation.
Security firm AIR showed how easily AI agent skills can be weaponized by building a benign-looking design skill, publishing it to marketplaces, and promoting it with an Instagram ad until it reached roughly 26,000 agents, including some on corporate accounts. Every skill-scanning tool they tested, including offerings from Cisco and Nvidia, marked it safe. The trick is that the skill itself stays clean but tells the agent to fetch instructions from an external page the attacker controls, which passes review while pointing at harmless content and can be swapped for a malicious install script later. Skills load into an agent with the same authority as a user's prompt.
JFrog found malicious npm packages that impersonate PostCSS build tools to drop a multi-stage Windows remote-access trojan on developer machines. One package, postcss-minify-selector-parser, is named to look like the widely used postcss-selector-parser library, which sees over 127 million weekly downloads, and even lists the real package as a dependency to seem plausible during a quick review. Once installed, it writes and runs a PowerShell script that pulls down the trojan. A second cluster of five packages delivers a dropper during npm install, with one server-side component that only serves the payload to victims matching a specific signature. Affected developers should remove the packages and rotate credentials.
Attackers compromised the build pipeline of ShapedPlugin, a WordPress plugin maker, and slipped malware into legitimate updates delivered to paying customers through the vendor's own update system. The tainted releases install a fake plugin that impersonates WooCommerce components, steals site credentials, and gives attackers the ability to write files remotely. Three paid plugins are affected: Product Slider Pro for WooCommerce, Real Testimonials Pro, and Smart Post Show Pro. The backdoor was injected into Pro builds on May 21, with the first customer reports on June 10. Versions on WordPress.org stayed clean, pointing to a compromise of the vendor's release infrastructure rather than the plugins themselves.
Aikido Security uncovered a coordinated campaign of at least 15 malicious plugins on the JetBrains Marketplace that pose as AI coding assistants but secretly steal the AI provider API keys developers enter. The plugins offer real features like chat, code review, and commit messages, so they work as advertised, but the moment a user pastes in an OpenAI, DeepSeek, or SiliconFlow key and clicks Apply, the key is silently sent to an attacker server over plain HTTP, with no prompt. The campaign has run since late October 2025, with new plugins as recent as June 10, and uses inflated downloads and fake reviews. Separately, malicious Chrome extensions were found capturing chatbot conversations.
Attackers hijacked the npm account of a former contributor to Mastra, a popular open-source framework for building AI applications, and in an 88-minute automated burst republished 144 packages under the @mastra scope with a hidden malicious dependency. The poisoned dependency, a fake clone of a date library, runs at install time: it disables TLS checks, downloads a second-stage cryptocurrency-stealing trojan, runs it as a detached process, and deletes itself. Because @mastra/core alone sees over 900,000 weekly downloads and the payload fires on install, anyone who installed an affected version since June 16 could be compromised before importing anything. npm has pulled the malicious versions.
Attackers compromised the content-delivery network of Awesome Motive, one of the biggest WordPress plugin makers, and injected malicious JavaScript into files served for OptinMonster, TrustPulse, and PushEngage, plugins running on more than 1.2 million sites. Discovered by Sansec, the code only triggered when a logged-in WordPress administrator viewed an affected site, at which point it stole authentication tokens, created a hidden rogue admin account, and installed a self-concealing backdoor plugin that exposed a web shell. The bad files were served on June 12 to 14. Awesome Motive says attackers stole a CDN API key after breaching its marketing site, and has since rotated credentials.
The North Korean campaign known as Contagious Interview is still expanding its assault on software developers, now leaning on poisoned developer tools and fake job offers. Researchers at Proofpoint and Expel describe obfuscated malicious npm packages, published from throwaway accounts, that install the OtterCookie infostealer through a post-install script, alongside recruitment and code-review phishing lures. The group is using generative AI to build its malware loaders and to set up fake companies and LinkedIn profiles for social engineering. Expel says the operation stole $12 million in cryptocurrency in the first three months of 2026, draining more than 26,000 wallets from over 2,700 infected developer machines.
Attackers hijacked more than 400 packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR), the community add-on store for Arch Linux, in a supply-chain attack dubbed Atomic Arch. Rather than exploiting a flaw, they adopted abandoned packages and quietly edited the build recipe (PKGBUILD) to pull in a malicious npm package, atomic-lockfile, at install time. The payload is a Rust credential stealer that grabs browser logins, SSH keys, crypto wallets, and developer tokens; when run as root it also loads an eBPF rootkit that hides its processes, files, and network connections. Only the AUR is affected, not Arch's official repositories. The package names and histories looked completely normal.
TrustStrike Labs