A recent investigation by supply‑chain security firm Socket, as reported by The Hacker News, uncovered a set of nine malicious NuGet packages that could unleash destructive payloads years after they were installed. The Hacker News+1 These aren’t typical malware infections — they’re logic bombs, lying dormant now, but programmed to trigger on specific future dates.
The attacker, under the alias “shanhai666,” uploaded these packages between 2023 and 2024. In total, they were downloaded 9,488 times, making the impact potentially wide-reaching.
Among the nine packages, the most dangerous is called Sharp7Extend, built to mimic a legitimate .NET library for communicating with Siemens S7 programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Here's how it works:
Sharp7Extend exploits C# extension methods — a feature that lets developers “add” methods to existing types without touching the original code. The attacker weaponized this to inject malicious checks during normal database or PLC operations.
The package checks the current date against hardcoded trigger dates that the attacker encrypted. Once a trigger date is reached, the package terminates the application process 20% of the time, seemingly at random.
For PLC write operations, after a delay of 30–90 minutes, the malware silently disrupts writes — corrupting or blocking them 80% of the time.
This sabotage continues until June 6, 2028, when the termination mechanism stops.
Other packages in the set target common databases: SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and are set to activate on August 8, 2027, and November 29, 2028 depending on the variant.
This campaign is not just clever — it’s built to evade detection and complicate response.
Delayed activation: Because these packages aren’t doing anything obviously malicious today, they can slip into development pipelines without raising alarms.
Probabilistic execution: The 20% chance of termination makes crashes look random — like hardware failures or flaky code.
Long planning horizon: Developers who added these dependencies in 2024 may have moved to other projects or companies by 2027–2028, making it hard to trace back who introduced the rogue code.
Forensics nightmare: Because the malicious behavior activates later — and quietly — it erases the attack’s paper trail. Incident responders may struggle to reconstruct how the malware got into the system.
For organizations — especially those running industrial control systems (ICS) or critical infrastructure — this threat is deeply worrying. What looks like a harmless dependency can be a ticking time bomb embedded in your software supply chain.
Traditional security tools often rely on detect and respond strategies: you detect malware, investigate it, and then remediate. But logic bombs like these break that model:
You may not even notice anything until years later.
When something goes wrong, the failure may not look like a cyberattack at all.
By then, the code that caused the problem could be disconnected from the current team or system as designed.
That’s why we need to shift how we defend.
Instead of just “detect and respond,” businesses now must adopt isolation and containment as a core part of their endpoint protection. You need a way to prevent malicious code — even if it's deeply buried and inactive — from doing damage when triggered.
This is where AppGuard comes in.
AppGuard is a proven endpoint protection platform with over 10 years of real-world use.
Unlike typical antivirus or EDR, AppGuard doesn’t rely on detecting malware signatures. Instead, it isolates and contains unknown or risky code, cutting off its ability to harm the system — even if it’s activated in the future.
With AppGuard, you can limit the potential damage of time-delayed threats like logic bombs, because malicious behavior is prevented from reaching critical parts of your infrastructure.
These NuGet logic bombs may still be dormant — but their activation window is coming fast. Waiting to detect them when they trigger may be too late. Proven defense needs to be in place today.
Business owners: talk with us at CHIPS about how we can protect your organization with AppGuard. Let us help you move beyond “detect and respond” and make the shift to isolation and containment — so even the most sophisticated, latent threats can’t bring your systems down.
Contact us now to schedule a consultation. Let’s make sure your infrastructure is secured — before the bomb goes off.
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