On September 9th, 2025, the JavaScript world got a reminder that our tools are only as safe as the people who maintain them. A phishing email tricked a well-known developer, Josh Junan (aka Quicks Online), the maintainer of widely-used packages like chalk and debug. That one click gave attackers access to his npm account, and from there, they pushed out malicious updates.
What actually happened?
The malicious code wasn’t just random spam. It was a crypto clipper, a sneaky bit of malware that swaps out wallet addresses when users send cryptocurrency. To make it even trickier, it used the Levenshtein distance algorithm to generate fake addresses that looked almost identical to the real ones.
In plain English: imagine copying your friend’s wallet address to send them Ethereum, and at the last second, the malware replaces it with a scammer’s address that looks the same at a glance. That’s what happened at scale.
Within just a couple of hours, these compromised packages were downloaded millions of times.
The damage (and the irony)
You’d think with that reach, attackers would walk away with millions. In reality, they only got about $50 worth of ETH. Pretty anticlimactic, but the real cost here isn’t the money it’s trust.
Developers are now (once again) asking: how safe is our supply chain? If even widely trusted packages can be compromised so quickly, what does that say about the security practices across the ecosystem?
Some have even joked about renaming npm install to npm prey. Funny, but also a little too real.
Lessons worth taking seriously
If you’re a developer, this incident is a reminder to:
- Don’t trust every email (even if it looks “official”).
- Enable 2FA on your npm and GitHub accounts non negotiable.
- Audit dependencies when possible, especially for critical apps.
- Keep an eye on security advisories in the community.
Open-source thrives on trust, and that trust is fragile. Security isn’t something we bolt on at the end it has to be part of the workflow.
🔒 At the end of the day, this attack wasn’t about the $50. It was a loud reminder: our supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
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