Shai-Halud Supply Chain Campaign — Expanded Impact & Vercel Response
By Steven Van ·
Vercel found 10 customer projects hit by the spreading Shai-Halud npm supply chain attack and shares steps to secure builds.
A supply chain campaign tracked as Shai-Halud has grown beyond its original scope. It started with the Qix compromise of around 18 core npm packages, including chalk, debug, and ansi-styles, then spread to over 40 more packages through a "worm" vector affecting Tinycolor, to the CrowdStrike/crowdstrike-publisher namespace, and to a compromised DuckDB maintainer account publishing versions of the same wallet-drainer malware. No Vercel customer builds were affected in the DuckDB incident.
Vercel identified 10 customer projects whose builds depended, directly or transitively, on the compromised package versions, and notified those customers with project-level guidance. In response, Vercel:
- Blocklisted known compromised versions from the Tinycolor, CrowdStrike, Qix, and DuckDB-affected packages
- Purged build caches for affected projects
- Coordinated safe rebuilds with clean dependencies and pinned safe versions
- Raised platform alerting and detection thresholds for new package publishes matching Shai-Halud indicators
Vercel is also working with npm, open-source maintainers, and ecosystem security partners to track further spread, and is tightening lifecycle/postinstall script policies, lockfile hygiene, registry validation, and internal CI/CD controls. It recommends that users enable pnpm 10.16's minimumReleaseAge setting to delay dependency updates, audit direct and transitive dependencies for the affected namespaces, rebuild with pinned versions and clean lockfiles, rotate npm/GitHub/CI/CD tokens used alongside the compromised dependencies, check for unauthorized GitHub workflow files, and limit lifecycle script permissions.
Read the full announcement, including the incident timeline.