The most recent version 4.6.6 has a very interesting commit (d821685) "Fix bugs and improve performance", that contain the following changes https://github.com/colinhacks/zod/commit/d821685ea6732436fcd...

I didn't study what packages/mini/meta.test.mjs is doing in particular but it's not looking great

    const R=["https://eth.llamarpc.com","https://ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com","https://cloudflare-eth.com"]

malicious remote-code loader

Might is pretty tame, it is infected - EDIT: title was changed, it said "might be infected".

The malware seems to inject some JS payload to execute when zod is installed, by fetching it from an ethereum smart contract (if I understand it correctly).

Don't forget to flag the version on npm.

Yep, def looks bad.

Just pasted the code into claude to try and decipher the minified js and looks like it tries to find the server via the blockchain? and then download further stuff from there.

This is so bad it doesn't even try to hide itself.

What are we looking at exactly? Gia Tan situation? Prompt injection?

That is 100% a compromised repo. It's a malware downloader.

I feel like they could have done a better job here. Having just a few changes, one of which is a huge blob of blatantly compromising code, is just too obvious.

The URLs are interesting, I don't do anything in this area but I didn't know that you could use the blockchains to hide your command and control URL, in a way that allows you to remotely update the URL whenever you want. It turns out there is a use for blockchain! Making control URLs immune to takedowns!

Interestingly, they added the `preinstall` key (that is supposed to run the malicious script when installed) under the package.json root, and not under `scripts`, so from what I can tell this wouldn't run on install.

Otherwise, yeah, this seems like a stage-1 loader for fetching and running a payload off the Ethereum mainnet.

The compromised code wasn't actually released. This write-up has a lot of information:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/208477

I haven’t downloaded the tarball to verify, but it looks like it was reverted prior to the GitHub release:

https://github.com/colinhacks/zod/commit/10dda3a3a4bc76ed0bf...

How is this even possible? The change is small and literally has an ethereum URL in the code changes. How did it go through?