Amazon has linked a string of high-profile supply chain attacks on the npm ecosystem to Sapphire Sleet, the North Korean threat actor also known as BlueNoroff and Stardust Chollima. The group’s campaign began quietly in March 2025 with the trojanization of the typo-crypto package — apparently a test run — before escalating in September 2025 to the compromise of debug and chalk, two of the most widely used Node.js libraries in existence. Within two hours of the malicious updates going live, Amazon estimates the tainted packages had touched roughly 10% of cloud environments. In March 2026, the same actor targeted axios, an HTTP client library with over 100 million weekly downloads, in an incident that had already been publicly attributed to DPRK-linked hackers but is now connected by Amazon to the earlier campaign.
The attack method in each case was social engineering: Sapphire Sleet convinced package maintainers to publish malicious updates, which were then automatically distributed downstream to any project that pulled a new install or locked to a floating version range. Amazon attributed the campaign with medium confidence based on shared tactics, command-and-control infrastructure, and operational patterns across the incidents. The group’s apparent motivation is financial — gaining broad, indirect access to a large downstream victim pool at once. Amazon noted that AI tools have lowered the barrier for these attacks by helping generate convincing code, documentation, and fake maintainer identities. Amazon said it has reported its findings to the open-source community and is investing $12.5 million in the Akrites initiative aimed at protecting critical open-source software from AI-enhanced supply chain attacks.