How we caught the Axios supply chain attack
Elastic Security Labs researcher Joe Desimone built a proof-of-concept supply-chain monitoring tool using LLM-powered diff analysis that detected the Axios npm package compromise in real-time on Monday night. The attack involved DPRK-attributed actors compromising maintainer credentials, injecting a phantom dependency with a postinstall hook deploying cross-platform malware, and affected one of the most widely-depended packages in the npm ecosystem. Desimone's tool, which monitors top 15k packages by polling PyPI and npm registries, then diffs and analyzes changes with Claude Composer 2, has been open-sourced as supply-chain-monitor.