Megg Sage
Megg is an application security engineer who started out as a web developer. Security drew her in with the endless puzzles and challenges put forth by the field. She loves sharing knowledge, particularly when she can both educate and frighten her audience at the same time. After all, what can happen when security goes wrong is pretty scary. She also enjoys working closely with software engineering teams to try to make security work within existing development practices, or at least try to minimize how painful "doing security" can be. When not behind a computer, she can usually be found making some sort of costume piece or shiny object.
2026 Talk
Talk Title: Anatomy of a Sandworm: A Deep Dive into the Shai-Hulud Attacks
Talk Abstract:
In September 2025, an obscure npm package shipped with a piece of JavaScript that should not have been there. A new beast had emerged among supply chain attacks. Within 48 hours, that JavaScript had copied itself into more than 180 packages. It did something that hadn't been seen before in such an attack. It was self-propagating. It was a worm. And it was LOUD. Hundreds of public repos were created, littered with stolen secrets. Within nine days, it had triggered an emergency CISA alert.
Two months later, we witnessed the "Second Coming": a far more aggressive successor returned, racing a deadline npm itself had set, and leaving behind roughly 700 compromised packages, ~25,000 GitHub repositories of stolen secrets, and a destructive payload that wiped victims' home directories when it couldn't exfiltrate them. And these were just the first two attacks.
This talk is a technical breakdown of the Shai-Hulud worm family: the first malware to spread successfully through the npm ecosystem as a self-replicating worm, and the iterations that followed. We'll examine how the malware infected its victims, turned legitimate security tooling against them, what it stole, and how it kept spreading.
Each iteration evolved to defeat the defenses put in place against the last, swapping tools, tactics, and even its JavaScript runtime. Stranger still: the malware wasn't trying to hide. It branded its own exfiltration repositories, named its propagation functions clearly in source, and used victims' own GitHub accounts to share stolen secrets. By the end, we'll have a clearer picture of how these supply chain worms work, and what each rising of Shai-Hulud has taught us.