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Eight Malicious npm Packages Downloaded 40,767 Times Deliver Overlord RAT and Stealer

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Eight Malicious npm Packages Downloaded 40,767 Times Deliver Overlord RAT and Stealer

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a long-running npm supply chain malware campaign that pushes information stealers and remote access trojans (RAT) to compromised hosts.

The campaign has been codenamed MALFEX by CloudSEK and Checkmarx. The activity is assessed to be the work of a lone threat actor who appears to have published 12 packages since August 2023, eight of which have been flagged as malicious.

In all, these packages have been collectively downloaded 40,767 times. Of these, 37,419 downloads correspond to "function-flag," making it the largest driver of this activity. The package was first published in July 2024. The latest version was released on August 4, 2025.

The project description for the npm package features a welcome message written in Portuguese that states: "This project was created with a lot of love and dedication by the Malfex team, whose owner is Murizada."

Three of the packages, "tlxbnhd," "tldriver," and "mxdriver," act as Overlord RAT loaders, with the malicious code triggered via lifecycle hooks to download and run a Windows executable.

A second subset of the npm packages, such as "img-to-native," requires "cdn-img-fetch" to retrieve and execute a Go executable, which then fetches a Node.js stealer capable of harvesting sensitive data.

Present within "function-flag" is a postinstall hook that runs a JavaScript payload to download a payload from a remote server. Each version of the package has been found to serve a payload from a different location. The "function-color" package embeds no payload of its own, but lists "function-flag" as a dependency.


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