Denying the Worm: Detecting SANDWORM_MODE and the Emerging Class of AI Toolchain Supply Chain Attacks

SANDWORM_MODE is a sophisticated multi-stage npm supply-chain worm observed across 19 malicious packages that targets AI-driven development pipelines, CI runners, and developer workstations; it uses heavy obfuscation, immediate credential and crypto-key theft in CI, delayed full payload activation on workstations, propagation via npm and GitHub, persistence through global Git hooks, exfiltration to HTTPS endpoints and GitHub repos (with DNS fallback), and includes a destructive file-shredding fallback if exfiltration/propagation fails.