In a daring escapade that could rival the finest of spy thrillers, three npm packages have been caught impersonating legitimate Telegram bot libraries. Their mission? To stealthily plant SSH backdoors on unsuspecting Linux systems, proving once again that the only thing more ambitious than a package maintainer is a package itself.

While James Bond has Q and his marvelous gadgets, these npm packages have opted for a less glamorous approach, disguising themselves under the unassuming monikers of node-telegram-utils, node-telegram-bots-api, and node-telegram-util. With download counts barely reaching triple digits, these packages were the cybersecurity equivalent of a spy blending into a crowd by pretending to be a very mundane houseplant.

Researchers stumbled upon this npm scandal, which was like finding out your beloved house plant is actually a cunning espionage agent. It’s a sad day indeed when the digital tools we trust to chat with Telegram opt instead to partake in shadier activities, like sneaking into your system to exfiltrate data. One might even say they were rooting for a different kind of outcome.