THREATPKG
SYNC STALE

Supply-chain threat intelligence

Incident detail

criticalnpm·malware·osv

Malicious code in venturo-playwright-runner (npm)

venturo-playwright-runner

Risk score

92

AI summary

Indexed incident for venturo-playwright-runner (npm).

Description

The package republishes Microsoft's @playwright/test under the unrelated name venturo-playwright-runner and falsifies its identity to claim Microsoft ownership: package.json sets author.name = "Microsoft Corporation", repository.url = git+https://github.com/microsoft/playwright.git, and homepage = https://playwright.dev. The shipped index.js does module.exports = require('playwright-core'), re-exporting the real upstream module. However, package.json declares a hard dependency on venturo-playwright-core@1.0.9 — a sibling under the same unknown publisher's namespace that is never require()'d anywhere in the package's code (only playwright-core is imported). Installing this package therefore silently pulls venturo-playwright-core@1.0.9 into the installer's dependency tree under the cover of a Microsoft-branded Playwright wrapper, with no functional reason for that dependency to be present. The combination of top-tier-publisher impersonation plus a pinned, unused sibling dependency is the canonical shape used to smuggle attacker-controlled code into installers via the dependency graph while keeping the surface package's own code innocuous to scanners.

Technical details

Indicators

  • affected version<function fixed() { [native code] }75%
  • affected version<function fixed() { [native code] }75%
  • affected version<function fixed() { [native code] }75%
  • affected version<function fixed() { [native code] }75%

Timeline

  1. Advisory published
  2. Indexed by ThreatPkg

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