Socket
Articles about Socket
arXiv Is Rate Limiting Authors Following a Flood of AI Slop Submissions
Low-quality submissions are overwhelming arXiv’s volunteer moderators and delaying quality papers for days or weeks. The preprint repository is now limiting each submitter to two submissions per calendar month.
New GhostAction Wave Hits Hundreds of Repos, Expanding Beyond CI/CD Secrets to Cloud Credentials
Socket analyzed an October 8, 2026 burst of the GhostAction campaign in which two compromised maintainer accounts committed a workflow named security-audit.yml into 346 repositories — among them uber/athenadriver and the 18,420-star kitao/pyxel — merging GitHub Actions secret theft with a new sweep of the working tree and full git history for cloud credentials,
Introducing Socket Scanning for VS Code Marketplace Extensions
If 2026 has shown us anything, it’s that the software supply chain doesn’t stop at the dependencies in your apps. It includes the tools your developers use to write, build, and ship code.
Pretty Themes, Hidden Loaders: GlassWorm-Linked Extensions Span VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX
Socket uncovered a theme cluster spanning four Visual Studio Marketplace and six Open VSX extensions, including two confirmed malicious extensions and a high-confidence link to GlassWorm.The Socket Threat Research team identified two suspicious VS Code themes still available on the Visual Studio Marketplace at the time of writing: Coca-Cola Christmas and Aurora Borealis Studio Theme.
Securing the Financial Frontier: How Capital One Uses Socket for Open Source Security
The financial sector operates in a hyper-targeted, unforgiving threat landscape. As the guardians of sensitive data and global economic infrastructure, financial institutions frequently face sophisticated cyber threats and some of the most rigorous regulatory scrutiny in the world. Yet, like every modern enterprise, they rely heavily on open source software to drive innovation and speed.
Insecure Agents Podcast: How to Keep AI Agents From Bypassing Security Controls
A coding agent blocked from installing a package may try another way to download it. In this episode of the Insecure Agents podcast recorded at Black Hat, Socket CTO Ahmad Nassri joins host Allie Howe to discuss how agents’ determination to finish a task can lead them to bypass security controls, and how Socket Firewall changes what they see before an install begins.
New AISI Report Details How GPT-6 Astra Turned CTF Challenges Into Supply Chain Attacks
Earlier this month, Socket reported that GPT-6 Astra tried to plant malicious code in simulated open source projects while working on an unrelated cybersecurity challenge. The UK AI Security Institute (AISI), which had access to the model before its release, first disclosed the behavior in OpenAI’s system card.
upm Launches as a Fast, Tiny Package Manager Written in TypeScript
There's a new package manager in town, and this one fits in about 250 KB. Pooya Parsa, a longtime Nuxt contributor and creator of Nitro and UnJS, has introduced upm, a TypeScript package manager for the npm registry that uses Node.js's built-in networking, worker threads, compression, and filesystem tools. It has a JavaScript API, reads supported .npmrc settings, and can install from several other package managers' lockfiles.
Socket Joins New OpenJS Program to Fund Node.js Security Work
Socket has joined the OpenJS Foundation’s new Security Stewardship Program as an inaugural partner, helping fund vulnerability research, triage, patching, and security releases across the JavaScript ecosystem.
Re-Enabled GitHub Actions Expose Thousands of Repositories to Mini Shai-Hulud
Two actions-cool GitHub Actions, issues-helper and maintain-one-comment, were compromised and disabled during the May 2026 Mini Shai-Hulud campaign. Both became reachable again on September 16, 2026, and their release tags still point to malicious code, so every workflow that references either one by tag rather than by commit SHA is running the payload again.The GitHub Actions actions-cool/issues-helper and actions-cool/maintain-one-comment were compromised in the May 2026 Mini Shai-Hulud campaign.
Malicious Firefox Extension Poses as PDF Identity Verifier to Hijack Google Accounts
Socket identified a Firefox extension that ships with no hardcoded malicious code and fetches a remote payload after installation to silently automate Google account takeover, targeting Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking users since September 11, 2026.Socket's Threat Research team identified a malicious Firefox extension posing as a utility for identity verification before opening protected PDF documents.
MemTensor npm and PyPI Packages Compromised in Credential-Stealing Supply Chain Attack
The compromise affects MemTensor's MemOS, an open source memory framework for large language models (LLMs) and AI agents. Its main GitHub repository has about 11,500 stars and 1,100 forks. Four malicious releases, three of the npm package @memtensor/memos-cloud-openclaw-plugin and one of the PyPI package MemoryOS, each currently the latest version on its registry, drop cross-platform Go binaries that search developer home directories for secrets and report to servers under skyleen[.]fr.
Lovable’s OJ Rewrites Vite’s Dev Server in Rust as AI Lowers the Cost of Forking Open Source
Lovable is beginning to replace Vite inside its cloud preview environments with OJ, a Rust-based build tool created for the demands of running around one million short-lived development sandboxes per day.
Happy Birthday, Shai-Hulud
This week marks one year since an attacker pushed a malicious version of @ctrl/tinycolor to npm, kicking off the worst year for npm security on record. At the time, the package was downloaded more than two million times a week. Within a day the same code was spreading on its own across dozens of packages, and then into CrowdStrike's npm namespace. It was the first known self-propagating worm in the npm ecosystem, and it has not really stopped since.
PolinRider Spreads Through Compromised GitHub Accounts and Packagist
Socket researchers identified malicious code in the dev-main version of visanduma/nova-two-factor, a Packagist package with more than 700,000 cumulative downloads, as the PolinRider campaign continues to spread through compromised developer accounts and Git repositories.The Socket Threat Research Team continues to track malicious activity associated with PolinRider.
GitHub Actions Adds cache-mode to Limit Cache Poisoning Risk
GitHub has added cache-mode to GitHub Actions, a new setting that limits how workflows and jobs can access the Actions cache. It targets cache poisoning, the technique attackers used to compromise the Ultralytics PyPI package in 2024 and the TanStack npm packages in May 2026.