This week we talked about:

GitHub’s two new account protection features: NPM added a 72-hour read-only lockout for high-impact accounts triggered by an email change or 2FA recovery code use, aimed at slowing account takeovers. Separately, GitHub Enterprise rolled out self-service credential revocation, letting enterprise owners revoke tokens, SSH keys, and SSO authorizations for a single user or the whole org during incident response. Paul flags an open question on both: the npm change could make ATO recovery harder for legitimate maintainers if it locks them out too, and the GitHub Enterprise tool’s scope may not cover personal access tokens created outside the enterprise boundary.

A security researcher’s malicious packages targeting AI companies: Paul found six npm packages published by a researcher at a stealth cybersecurity startup, targeting OpenAI, Anthropic, Vercel, and Ollama users. The packages avoid exfiltrating credentials directly but do pull data from .git and .ssh, which Paul argues crosses an ethical line for security research. He draws a direct parallel to the 2025 incident where a Snyk researcher published malicious packages targeting Cursor.

FBI FLASH notice on TeamPCP: The FBI issued a FLASH covering TeamPCP’s behavior and IOCs. Note - you’ll get more complete info on their malware and TTPs from OpenSourceMalware.com

Next week’s special guest: Jenn and Paul will be joined by Mikael Barbero, Head of Security at the Eclipse Foundation, to talk about Open VSX. The draw: AI IDE platforms like Cursor and Windsurf use Open VSX instead of the official VS Code marketplace, which is turning it into a more attractive target for threat actors.

Resources

• (blog) NPM adds preventive account protection for high-impact accounts
• (blog) Self-service credential revocation for incident response
• (blog) Snyk appears to deploy ‘malicious’ packages targeting Cursor for unknown reason
• (PDF) FBI FLASH on Team PCP