axios npm compromise checker: did you install a malicious version?

An attacker took over the npm account of axios’s lead maintainer and published axios 1.14.1 at 00:21 UTC and 0.30.4 at about 01:00 UTC on 31 March 2026. Both were removed at 03:15 UTC, roughly three hours later, according to the maintainers’ post-mortem. The maintainer was targeted with a social-engineering campaign that installed a remote access trojan on their machine.

Both releases added plain-crypto-js@4.2.1 as a dependency. Its install script contacts the attacker’s server and drops a platform-specific remote access trojan on Windows, macOS and Linux (Microsoft Threat Intelligence, which attributes it to Sapphire Sleet, a North Korean state actor).

GitHub published the malware advisories GHSA-fw8c-xr5c-95f9 (axios) and GHSA-2x9r-6wxq-hrr7 (plain-crypto-js); OSV.dev carries them as MAL-2026-2307 and MAL-2026-2306.

• axios

  Affected

  1.14.1 and 0.30.4 (removed from npm)

  Fixed or safe

  Any other release; the maintainers pointed to 1.14.0 and 0.30.3 at the time

• plain-crypto-js

  Affected

  Every version (a malicious package)

  Fixed or safe

  Remove it

Affected: any machine or CI runner that ran npm install (or yarn, pnpm or bun) and resolved axios to 1.14.1 or 0.30.4 between 00:21 and 03:15 UTC on 31 March 2026, directly or through another package. GitHub’s advisory says to treat such a machine as fully compromised.

Not affected: installs that kept a lockfile pinning another axios version, installs before or after that window, and projects that don’t use axios at all. A range such as ^1.14.0 could only have pulled 1.14.1 during the window, because npm no longer serves it.

1. 1Search every lockfile (package-lock.json, yarn.lock, pnpm-lock.yaml, bun.lock) for plain-crypto-js: only the two malicious axios releases pulled it in. The maintainers’ post-mortem gives a grep for it. Check CI logs from 31 March too.
2. 2If you find either: rotate every secret and key that machine or runner could reach, from a different computer. Removing the package doesn’t guarantee the trojan is gone, so rebuild the machine or runner.
3. 3Look for outbound traffic to sfrclak[.]com or 142.11.206.73 on port 8000, the indicators Microsoft and OSV list.
4. 4Move axios to the current release (the check above shows which), and keep exact versions in a committed lockfile so a new release can’t reach you unreviewed.

• axios maintainers’ post-mortem (issue #10636)
• axios incident thread (issue #10604)
• Microsoft: mitigating the axios npm supply chain compromise
• GitHub advisory GHSA-fw8c-xr5c-95f9 (axios)
• GitHub advisory GHSA-2x9r-6wxq-hrr7 (plain-crypto-js)
• MAL-2026-2307 on OSV.dev