AsyncAPI npm releases carried a Miasma botnet loader

Four npm packages in the @asyncapi namespace shipped a multi-stage botnet loader on July 14, 2026, after an attacker stole the project's publishing token by way of a misconfigured GitHub Actions workflow. Together the affected packages account for roughly 2.9 million downloads a week.

AsyncAPI is an open specification and toolchain for describing event-driven APIs, and its generator turns those specifications into code and documentation. Socket, which analyzed the releases, said the malicious versions were @asyncapi/generator-helpers@1.1.1, @asyncapi/generator-components@0.7.1, @asyncapi/generator@3.3.1, and @asyncapi/specs at 6.11.2 and 6.11.2-alpha.1, all published within minutes of each other.

The entry point was a pull_request_target workflow in the generator repository. That trigger runs with the base repository's secrets available, including automation tokens, while checking out code a contributor controls. Aikido described the result as npm packages backdoored through the project's own release automation, which is why the poisoned versions arrived looking like ordinary releases.

The loader did not use an install hook. Socket said the injected code ran when Node.js imported the module, then spawned a detached node -e process that pulled an 8.25 MB encrypted payload from IPFS and stored it in directories named to resemble Node.js runtime paths. Decrypted, that payload was Miasma: a modular cross-platform tasking framework with REST-based command and control, file listing and transfer, shell execution, payload update, and persistence through systemd user services. Because execution happened on import rather than on install, npm install --ignore-scripts offered no protection. Investigators were told to treat any machine that imported the packages as compromised and to watch for detached Node processes and IPFS gateway traffic.