North Korea-linked hackers target Rust software supply chain

Cybersecurity investigators have linked a supply-chain attack on three widely used Rust software packages to infrastructure associated with North Korean threat actors, raising fresh concerns over attempts to compromise developers before applications are even built.

Malicious versions of arrayref, internment and append-only-vec were published on crates. io, the official package registry for the Rust programming language, on August 20. The altered releases introduced a dependency called proc-macro1, designed to resemble the legitimate and widely used proc-macro2 package.

The affected versions were arrayref 0.3.10, internment 0.8.7 and append-only-vec 0.1.9. Investigators found that proc-macro1 contained a build script capable of downloading and executing a second-stage payload automatically when developers compiled software containing one of the compromised packages.

The technique made the attack particularly dangerous because malicious activity could begin during the software-building process rather than after an application had been launched. Development machines and continuous integration environments that compiled affected projects therefore faced potential exposure even when the finished application itself appeared to function normally.

Arrayref presented the widest potential attack surface. The package has accumulated hundreds of millions of downloads and is found in more than a third of environments examined across broader software infrastructure. Among environments running Rust applications, its presence has been estimated at roughly three-quarters.

Investigators have not established that every environment containing arrayref downloaded the malicious release. The poisoned version remained available for about 86 minutes before being removed, sharply limiting the exposure window compared with supply-chain compromises that remain undiscovered for days or months.

Internment 0.8.7 was available for roughly 90 minutes, while append-only-vec 0.1.9 remained online for about 107 minutes. Other malicious packages connected to the operation, including proc-macro-en, aovine, arone, aronenao and tinymember, were also removed from the registry.

The legitimate maintainer associated with the three compromised packages is not believed to have deliberately introduced the malware. Evidence indicates that either the maintainer’s computer or publishing credentials were compromised, enabling the attacker to issue modified versions through an account already trusted by developers.

Technical analysis of the second-stage malware showed cross-platform capabilities targeting Windows, macOS and Linux systems. The backdoor could collect information about infected machines, establish persistence and receive commands from remote infrastructure. It was also capable of downloading and executing additional PowerShell or shell scripts.

Investigators found functions associated with gathering browser information from Chrome, Brave and Edge databases, alongside mechanisms for maintaining access after a machine restarted. Windows systems could be modified through Registry Run keys, while macOS and Linux variants used platform-specific persistence mechanisms.

The infrastructure provided the strongest evidence connecting the attack to North Korea-linked operations. Command-and-control communications used an endpoint previously observed during the compromise of the Mastra software ecosystem. Related server infrastructure also overlapped with systems connected to the poisoning of the Axios npm package earlier this year.

Those earlier operations have been associated with a North Korea-linked group commonly tracked as Sapphire Sleet. Other threat-intelligence teams use different identifiers for overlapping North Korean clusters, making exact organisational attribution difficult. Investigators therefore describe the Rust connection as substantial infrastructure overlap rather than definitive proof that the same operators conducted every campaign.

The Rust incident fits a broader pattern of attacks against open-source ecosystems. North Korea-linked operators have targeted npm, PyPI, Rust, Go and PHP packages while also using fraudulent recruitment approaches to persuade developers to execute malicious code.

One campaign targeting software developers has distributed more than 1,700 malicious packages across several programming ecosystems since 2025. Operators have combined package impersonation, compromised maintainer accounts, social engineering and fake development projects to obtain access to machines that may hold source code, authentication tokens, cryptocurrency credentials and cloud secrets.

Another series of compromises affected widely used npm libraries after attackers gained access to trusted maintainer accounts. Axios, a JavaScript library downloaded more than 100 million times a week, was among the prominent targets identified during 2026.

Security teams are being advised to examine dependency lockfiles and local Cargo caches for the affected Rust versions. Systems that compiled the poisoned packages during the exposure window may require investigation even if no obvious malicious activity has appeared.