The Largest NPM Attack in Crypto History Stole Less Than $50

Hackers launched a massive supply-chain attack targeting widely used JavaScript libraries downloaded billions of times worldwide. The incident had the potential to compromise thousands of crypto projects and millions of developer workstations. Yet the attackers walked away with a laughably small amount – less than $50 in crypto.

An Attack That Could Have Shaken the Crypto World According to findings from Security Alliance, hackers gained access to the account of a developer managing NPM packages and inserted malware into popular libraries aimed at crypto wallets, specifically Ethereum and Solana. NPM serves developers much like an app store – a central repository for small code utilities used in JavaScript projects. The compromised packages included chalk, strip-ansi, and color-convert, utilities deeply embedded in dependency trees. Even developers who never installed them directly could have been exposed.

The Damage: So Far Under $50 Security researchers identified a single malicious Ethereum wallet address, 0xFc4a48. To date, it has collected only about $50 worth of crypto. Just a few hours earlier, the amount was a mere five cents, hinting that the total losses could rise slightly. “Imagine this: you compromise an NPM developer account with more than two billion weekly downloads. You could gain unlimited access to millions of developer machines. Endless riches await. And you make less than $50,” Security Alliance wrote on X. Samczsun, a security researcher at SEAL, compared the attack to finding the keys to Fort Knox and using them as a bookmark: “The malware was widespread, but at this point it is almost completely neutralized.”

What Was Stolen? According to Etherscan, the malicious wallet has received small amounts of: Ethereum (ETH) – just a few cents initiallyBrett (BRETT)Andy (ANDY)Dork Lord (DORK)Ethervista (VISTA)Gondola (GONDOLA) Altogether, the value does not exceed $50.

Who Is Safe and Who Isn’t? The attack deployed a crypto clipper malware designed to silently replace wallet addresses during transactions. This means users had to approve the malicious transaction for the theft to occur. Fortunately, major crypto wallet providers quickly reassured users: Ledger and MetaMask confirmed their apps were unaffected, citing multiple security layers.Phantom Wallet said it does not use any vulnerable packages.Uniswap reported no impact on its applications.Other unaffected platforms included Aerodrome, Blast, Blockstream Jade, and Revoke.cash. According to pseudonymous DefiLlama founder 0xngmi, only projects updated after the malicious package was published could be at risk.

Advice for Users Experts, including Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet, urged crypto users to be extra cautious when approving on-chain transactions. Some even suggested avoiding crypto websites temporarily until developers fully remove the compromised packages.

Conclusion The NPM hack highlighted how vulnerable the software supply chain can be – even for projects that never directly used the compromised code. Ironically, it became one of the least profitable hacks in crypto history. While the potential losses could have been astronomical, the attackers only netted a few dozen dollars.

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