Laravel-lang packages backdoored in May 2026, exposing secrets from 5,500+ repos

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Between May 22–23, 2026, attackers compromised a single account in the laravel-lang organization and silently rewrote git tags across four packages — laravel-lang/lang, laravel-lang/attributes, laravel-lang/http-statuses, and laravel-lang/actions — within a 90-minute window. The malicious payload, a helpers.php file injected via Composer's autoload.files mechanism, executed automatically on every PHP request without any action from application code. Within six hours, over 5,500 downstream repositories had received the backdoored code, which exfiltrated sensitive credentials including AWS keys, GitHub tokens, SSH keys, and .env files to an external domain. The attack exploited a lesser-known Composer behavior where version constraints resolve to git tags, meaning rewritten tags can deliver different code even when a pinned version appears unchanged. Developers are advised to always deploy using composer install against a committed lockfile rather than running composer update in CI or production environments, and to treat any affected build environment as compromised if it ran installs during that window.

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