Shai-Hulud npm worm planted IDE backdoors that survived clean reinstalls

A supply chain attack called Shai-Hulud compromised the GitHub account of Node.js package maintainer Jared Wray, leading to malicious versions of widely-used caching packages — keyv, flat-cache, file-entry-cache, and cacheable-request — being published to npm. Because these packages sit in ESLint's dependency chain, any project using ESLint fell within the attack's blast radius regardless of direct installation. The malware scraped credentials from AWS, GitHub CLI, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, and AI tool config files, then used stolen npm tokens to self-replicate across 868 packages and 1,381 versions. Unusually, the worm also wrote a persistence hook into .vscode/tasks.json configured to execute automatically whenever the infected project folder was opened in VS Code, meaning the payload could fire even after developers removed node_modules and ran a clean install. The attack evaded standard defenses entirely — npm audit reported nothing, no CVE was assigned, and the malicious releases carried cryptographically valid Sigstore signatures generated through the attacker's hijacked CI pipeline.