Hackers Target Popular Nx Build System in First AI-Weaponized Supply Chain Attack

Hackers targeted the popular Nx build system in what SecurityWeek calls the first AI-weaponized supply chain attack, dubbed s1ngularity, which rode on a platform with more than 4 million weekly downloads. They stole an Nx NPM token to publish multiple malicious versions and used a GITHUB_TOKEN harvested from a pull request to a fork of nrwl/nx to trigger the publish workflow, allowing the attackers to push compromised packages while the bug was still exploitable.

Between 6:32 PM and 8:37 PM EDT on 26 August, eight malicious Nx iterations were published, later removed, and the NPM tokens’ publishing permissions were revoked; within hours, all Nx NPM packages were updated to require 2FA and switched to a Trusted Publisher mechanism that does not use NPM tokens.

Wiz and GitGuardian reported that thousands of repositories were affected and that, at its peak, almost 1,400 repositories were publicly accessible; GitGuardian notes that the hackers exfiltrated 2,349 distinct secrets to 1,079 repositories identified on 27 August. The attackers reportedly weaponised AI tools such as Claude and Gemini for reconnaissance and data exfiltration, according to SecurityWeek’s report.