Threat Intelligence Batten Down Your Packages: Mitigation Guidance for Supply Chain Compromise By Google Threat Intelligence Group • 18-minute read

KUALA LUMPUR, 6 AUGUST 2026 —

Headline: Threat Intelligence Batten Down Your Packages: Mitigation Guidance for Supply Chain Compromise By Google Threat Intelligence Group • 18-minute read Lead: Stop attacks, reduce risk, and advance your security. For years, the cybersecurity industry's understanding of software supply chain compromise has been anchored by a few watershed events, including Russian cyber espionage actor ICE RELIC’s (formerly known as APT29) 2020 compromise of SolarWinds and North Korean cyber espionage actor UNC4736's 2023 compromise of 3CX . However, Google Threat Intell Body: Stop attacks, reduce risk, and advance your security. For years, the cybersecurity industry's understanding of software supply chain compromise has been anchored by a few watershed events, including Russian cyber espionage actor ICE RELIC’s (formerly known as APT29) 2020 compromise of SolarWinds and North Korean cyber espionage actor UNC4736's 2023 compromise of 3CX . However, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has been tracking growth in threat activity targeting open source software repositories to conduct supply chain compromises over the past several years. A series of large scale open source software supply chain compromise campaigns in 2025 and the first half of 2026 underscore how important it is that organizations implement defensive strategies that directly address this threat vector. In this blog post, GTIG and Mandiant discuss trends we have observed in threat actor use of software supply chain compromise, and provide mitigation and hardening recommendations that incorporate insights we have developed as a result of supporting customers through recent campaigns in which threat actors manipulated open source packages. The majority of the most impactful and far-reaching supply chain compromise incidents that GTIG tracked in 2025 and early 2026 involved the compromise of code repositories, software dependencies and developer tools (T1195.001). Open source supply chain compromises offer attackers the same efficiency, scale, and initial stealth as traditional supply chain compromises, but typically require significantly less planning and resources to execute. However, open source supply chain compromises are also noisy once enabled; malicious open source packages are often discovered and publicized much more quickly than traditional supply chain compromises. GTIG assesses with high confidence that the growth in very large-scale, open-source supply chain compromise campaigns , including use of worms and iterative compromises in 2025 and early 2026, represent a significant expansion in use of this tactic compared to prior years. We anticipate that threat actors will emulate the tactics of these campaigns and contribute to growth in open-source supply chain compromise through the rest of 2026 and years to come. GTIG identified several notable supply chain compromises in 2025 and early 2026 that we believe exemplify this trend of exceptionally large campaigns, as measured by size and/or impact (Figure 1). For example from February to May 2026, UNC6780 (aka "TeamPCP") conducted extensive open source supply chain compromises targeting ecosystems like PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub. Initial infection vectors varied across incidents, and included abuse of the pull_request_target GitHub Actions trigger to obtain base repository secrets and write permissions. The threat actor typically used compromised packages to deploy credential stealers, including SANDCLOCK, to obtain high value secrets. In incident response engagements, we observed UNC6780 attempting to pivot from compromised artificial intelligence (AI) software to broader network environments. UNC6780 has monetized stolen credentials through either direct sale of the stolen data, or through partnerships with ransomware and data theft extortion groups. In March 2026, GTIG observed the introduction of a malicious dependency in the legitimate axios package. GTIG analysis and the maintainer's post mortem indicate that the maintainer account was compromised via social engineering and used to publish the updated versions. We identified the malicious dependency as a dropper that deploys the WAVESHAPER.V2 backdoor, and attributes the activity to North Korean actor MIDNIGHT NEPTUNE (formerly known as UNC1069 ). While the malicious versions of axios were removed from the npm registry within three hours of their release, the scope of the compromise is estimated to be broad, as the package has over 100 million weekly downloads. GTIG supported customers in at least 15 industry verticals and 13 different countries affected by this incident. Further, axios is also a dependency for tens of thousands of other packages, and open sources reported that the malicious axios update had spread to several of these. GTIG anticipates AI will accelerate the growth of open source software supply chain compromise. Integration of AI into open source software development practices, including "vibe coding," increases attacker opportunities both to manipulate AI functionalities and to take advantage of AI to speed and scale their own operational planning. Open sources have documented multiple instances of threat actors planting malicious resources on open source AI communities and inserting malicious code into open source Model Context Protocol (MCP) packages. MCP is a standardized protocol for AI to interact with tools and data. Malicious packages have also tricked AI coding agents, which have unwittingly incorporated them into projects. North Korean threat actors reportedly uploaded malicious cryptocurrency-themed packages, and subsequently an AI coding agent co-authored a commit integrating one of the malicious packages as a dependency to a legitimate cryptocurrency trading project. Corroborating GTIG's findings, statistics compiled by the Open Source Security Foundation ( OpenSSF ), a cross-industry, non-profit collaboration under the Linux Foundation, indicate that the number of malicious open source software packages identified increased exponentially, or 1,444% from 2024 to 2025 (Figure 2). In contrast to what we observed in the open source ecosystem, GTIG assesses with high confidence that traditional software supply chain compromise, the manipulation of source code or update/distribution mechanisms (T1195.002), remains rare. The handful of identified cases in 2025 and early 2026 were predominantly cyber espionage incidents with intentionally limited targeting scopes. In the most significant case, North Korean threat actor UNC4899 reportedly used social engineering to compromise a developer's machine at a web3 organization. The threat actor used this access to inject malicious code into the frontend systems, specifically impacting smart contract functionality to alter transactions initiated by a third party organization that utilized the multi-signature wallet with the targeted organization. This compromise was tailored to a single… (AI-assisted rewrite, based on the original source)

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