Malicious Code Vulnerability in prospective_crawdad-smiletea Package
Summary
MAL-2025-107365: Malicious code in prospective_crawdad-smiletea (npm). Affected versions are not published. No fix is published. How to fix ↓
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Background
The prospective_crawdad-smiletea package is part of the npm ecosystem and is associated with the tea.xyz token reward campaign. This package is designed to facilitate the generation and publication of derivative packages, which are often used to inflate developer reputation scores for token rewards. However, it has been identified as containing malicious code that compromises its integrity.
Vulnerability Detail
The vulnerability originates from the package's malicious payload, which modifies the package.json file to remove private flags, alters version numbers, and generates random package names. This behavior leads to the continuous republishing of variants that pollute the npm registry, potentially affecting other developers and users by introducing untrusted code into their environments.
How To Fix
This package is malicious. Remove it and rotate any credentials it could have accessed.
npm uninstall prospective_crawdad-smileteaIf it arrived as a transitive dependency, remove the package that pulled it in, then reinstall.
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Workaround
As a temporary workaround, you can avoid using the prospective_crawdad-smiletea package altogether and look for alternative packages that provide similar functionality without the associated risks.
Conclusion
The prospective_crawdad-smiletea package is compromised by malicious code that can adversely affect developers and users. It is crucial to uninstall this package and monitor your applications for vulnerabilities using tools like Vulert to maintain security.
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FAQ
The package contains malicious code that modifies package.json files and republishes variants to pollute the npm registry.
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You should uninstall the prospective_crawdad-smiletea package immediately using 'npm uninstall prospective_crawdad-smiletea'.
Yes, you should look for alternative packages that provide similar functionality but do not have known vulnerabilities.
Vulert monitors and alerts in real-time for open-source vulnerabilities in your software by analyzing the package-lock.json file.
