@marketfront/commonecommercenpm

The @marketfront/commonecommerce package is part of a 25-package malicious campaign batch-published to the @marketfront npm scope by npm user 'marketfront' ([email protected]) within a roughly 3-minute window on 2026-07-01. All packages in the campaign were published at version 7.0.0 and use e-commerce/marketing frontend component names as cover.

The package declares a postinstall hook (node scripts/postinstall.js) that executes heavily obfuscated (obfuscator.io-style) code automatically at npm install time. Static analysis of the decoded payload revealed a credential harvester that dynamically requires fs, os, http, https, zlib, path and dns, then reads approximately 20 sensitive credential files including ~/.ssh, ~/.aws/credentials, ~/.kube/config, ~/.docker/config.json, ~/.npmrc, ~/.netrc, ~/.pgpass, ~/.git-credentials, ~/.env and ~/.bash_history. Collected data is exfiltrated via a gzip-compressed HTTPS POST with a custom X-Secret header to the path /api/v1/events, alongside a DNS resolver beacon. The command-and-control host is concealed behind an additional RC4+XOR encryption layer around an embedded configuration blob and was not statically resolved.

The decoded behavioral payload (module requires, credential-file target list, exfiltration headers and endpoint) is byte-for-byte identical across sampled packages in the campaign. The campaign shares tooling and infrastructure patterns (obfuscated postinstall credential harvester, X-Secret header, /api/v1/events exfiltration path, RC4-concealed C2) with the earlier @emcd-vue campaign, indicating the same actor rotating scopes and disposable maintainer emails.

This package is a malicious install-time credential/host harvester wearing a fake corporate-telemetry cover story. On npm install, the postinstall lifecycle hook runs scripts/postinstall.js, a 162 KB obfuscator.io-style bundle that uses a shuffled string array with RC4+base64 decoders (a0d/a0e/a0f) to hide every literal, including all require(...) module names (fs, http, https, dns, os) and destination hosts. At install time it collects process.env in full, hostname/username/OS/CPU/arch, the npm user-agent, and named Windows env vars (USERDOMAIN, COMPUTERNAME, APPDATA, LOCALAPPDATA, PROGRAMDATA, TEMP, NODE_OPTIONS), plus reads local files via fs.readFileSync and directory listings via readdirSync. The collected data is RC4-encrypted and shipped over two parallel channels: (1) an HTTPS POST to a runtime-assembled host (lpqgnt builds {hostname, port, path, method:'POST',...} from decoded string-array entries), and (2) DNS-label tunneling (oaulmd chunks the encrypted payload with /.{1,50}/g and issues resolve('<chunk>.<idx>.<rand>.<host>') queries against a hardcoded resolver) — a covert channel designed to bypass HTTP egress filtering. Before exfiltrating, the payload inspects process.argv, process.execPath, process.env.NODE_OPTIONS, and a wall-clock timing check to detect analysis environments, and defers execution behind a randomized setTimeout. The package presents itself as an internal 'Marketfront Platform Engineering' metrics client (author [email protected], homepage docs.marketfront.io, README claiming 'anonymous telemetry to telemetry.marketfront.io' and instructing users to point .npmrc at npm.marketfront.io), but none of that infrastructure exists as a real organization — it is dependency-confusion cover. The advertised library API is non-functional: dist/index.js is a two-line stub re-exporting ../src/index.js, and src/ is not shipped, so the postinstall dropper is the only reachable code.