Which versions of chai-as-crack are malicious?

The following npm versions of chai-as-crack are flagged malicious: 7.0.5. Treat any of these as compromised.

How do I remediate chai-as-crack if I installed it?

chai-as-crack is a typosquat — you almost certainly intended a legitimately-named package. Remove chai-as-crack, install the correct package, and rotate any secrets exposed during the install since post-install scripts may have already run.

I already installed chai-as-crack — how do I know if it already compromised me?

If chai-as-crack was installed, its post-install payload may already have run. Removing the package does not undo that — check outbound connections and credential use from the install window onward.

Is chai-as-crack part of a known attack campaign?

Yes — chai-as-crack is associated with the IN-MAL-2026-020071 campaign. Packages in the same campaign often share infrastructure and payloads, so check whether any related packages are also in your dependency tree.

How do I find chai-as-crack across my projects, lockfiles, and CI pipelines?

Search your lockfiles and build artifacts for chai-as-crack (version 7.0.5).

Malicious package

chai-as-cracknpm

Advisory published Sep 15, 2026Updated Sep 15, 2026

chai-as-crack is a confirmed malicious npm package (MAL-2026-16196) that typosquats a legitimate package to trick installs (malicious version 7.0.5). Do not install it — remove it immediately and rotate any exposed credentials.

Malicious code in chai-as-crack (npm)

MAL-2026-16196

Immediate action

Remove the package, then rotate any secrets the build/runtime could reach.

npm uninstall chai-as-crack

What this malware does

Package's main entry (index.js) unconditionally requires./lib/config at top level, causing the file to execute on any require('chai-as-crack'). lib/config.js is approximately 4 MB of obfuscator.io-transformed code: a rotating string array of ~23,868 entries with hex-escaped identifiers, multiple decoder wrappers (T, j), and control-flow flattening. The exported middleware is a no-op decoy. Package metadata further disguises the module as the popular pino logger: package.json declares name chai-as-crack with keywords logger/stream/json, while README.md, docs/, index.d.ts, and LICENSE are copied verbatim from pino (linking to github.com/pinojs/pino). Author metadata (Robert King [email protected], bugs URL https://jsonspack.com/issues) is unrelated to pino. The combination of import-time execution of an opaque multi-megabyte payload, heavy obfuscation with no source map or build artifacts, and a cover-story impersonating an unrelated well-known logger matches the loader/dropper shape and gives the publisher arbitrary code execution inside any consumer that imports the package.

Malicious versions

1 flagged

7.0.5

Indicators of compromise (SHA-256)

090c71f12df6d5441dce686e54fef42805f1afd6575d48bc0f6263dcf50b2f21

Detection & response playbook

Typosquat

Find it
Search your lockfiles and build artifacts for chai-as-crack (version 7.0.5).
If you installed it — respond
chai-as-crack is a typosquat — you almost certainly intended a legitimately-named package. Remove chai-as-crack, install the correct package, and rotate any secrets exposed during the install since post-install scripts may have already run.
Did it already run?
If chai-as-crack was installed, its post-install payload may already have run. Removing the package does not undo that — check outbound connections and credential use from the install window onward.

Frequently asked questions

No. chai-as-crack on npm has been identified as a malicious package (version 7.0.5 flagged). It should be removed immediately — do not install or keep it in your dependency tree.

Campaign

IN-MAL-2026-020071

References

npmjs.com

Credits

Amazon Inspector · finder

Detect & block this

O3 blocks chai-as-crack-class packages before install and in CI — and if it already ran, its runtime egress monitoring catches the malicious outbound activity and severs the channel.

Malware detection Runtime egress monitoring

Explore

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