And the latest supply-chain attack using a hijacked verified GitHub orgPolymarket has exploded in popularity, and so have “copy-trading” and arbitrage bots. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them on GitHub are either outright malicious or low-quality scams.
Why Most Are Malicious/Garbage
- High financial incentive: Crypto traders are willing to run random GitHub code if it promises easy profits. Attackers exploit this greed with polished READMEs, fake stars/forks from bot farms, and screenshots of “winning” trades.
- Low barrier: Creating a convincing-looking repo is cheap. Most bots are forks with minimal changes + hidden malware.
- Supply-chain attacks are easy: Typosquatted npm packages, obfuscated postinstall scripts, and transitive dependencies let attackers steal keys without obvious malicious code in the main repo.
- Social proof manipulation: Hijacked legitimate orgs (like dev-protocol), inflated engagement, and deleted warning issues create false legitimacy.
- Real functionality as cover: Many bots actually connect to Polymarket APIs so victims don’t immediately notice the theft.
In short: If it looks too good to be true and asks for your private key or .env, it probably is.
The Latest Case: Hijacked dev-protocol Org
A verified Japanese DeFi GitHub organization (dev-protocol) was compromised around February 2026 and turned into a distribution hub for malicious Polymarket bots.
Attackers created 20+ repos (e.g. polymarket-copytrading-bot-sport and variants) with professional branding.The trap lives in package.json:
"dependencies": {
"ts-bign": "1.2.8", // typosquat for big.js
"big-nunber": "5.0.2" // typosquat for bignumber.js
}
These pull in two malicious packages:
- levex-refa — steals .env files, Solana id.json keypairs, config files, and exfils them to Vercel C2 servers disguised as Cloudflare.
- lint-builder — runs a postinstall script that installs a persistent SSH backdoor (chown ~/.ssh, enable ufw, open port 22).
The bot itself works perfectly against real Polymarket endpoints — perfect camouflage.
Stay paranoid. Verify everything.
Tags: #security #npm #supplychainattack #polymarket #cryptocurrency #malware #javascript #devops
What has been your experience with open-source trading bots? Have you been burned?
