Amazon Links Debug and Chalk npm Hijack to North Korea’s Sapphire Sleet

Amazon has tied the September 2025 hijack of the npm packages debug and chalk to North Korea. For ten months, the incident sat in the public record as crypto theft: a maintainer phished through a lookalike npm domain and a wallet-draining script pushed into at least 18 packages carrying more than 2 billion weekly downloads between them. The original Aikido and Wiz reports did not attribute the

According to Amazon Threat Intelligence, the September 2025 compromise of the highly popular npm libraries debug and chalk—impacting at least 18 packages with roughly 2 billion weekly downloads—has now been attributed to a North Korea-linked threat actor known as Sapphire Sleet.[2][3][8][9] The attackers phished a maintainer via a lookalike npm domain and then pushed wallet-draining malware through trusted packages, turning the open-source ecosystem itself into a distribution channel for financially motivated attacks.[2][8][16] This is part of a broader, coordinated supply chain campaign by the same DPRK-linked group that later compromised axios and other packages, illustrating how a single maintainer account can become a systemic risk to downstream users and AI-powered systems that rely on JavaScript and npm tooling.[1][3][7][14] From a RealGround perspective, the incident underscores the need for rigorous AI supply chain governance: organizations should maintain SBOMs for AI-related services, enforce strict controls on developer credentials and publishing tokens, and continuously monitor and test build pipelines and agent frameworks for dependency hijacks and malicious pa