cortana-md-engine

GHSA-25rm-w924-v83v

Malicious code in cortana-md-engine (npm)

Details

**Severity:** Critical

**Affected versions:** `= 1.4.6`

## Source: amazon-inspector (9a2de4b6992a1dd7177803253b8c214d1ba7cc911cf0e1e7f800e1e9ff7ab5b1)
cortana-md-engine is a Baileys-based WhatsApp bot whose bundled entrypoints dist/hosted.cjs and dist/index.cjs hardcode five mongodb+srv://cortanauser:...@{cluster2.uvds2qk,cluster3.t2gtazm,cluster4.bwuctn9,cluster5.kdkad04,mass.gcijtck}.mongodb.net Atlas connection strings and, at bot startup, persist the Baileys authState/creds (Session/authState/sessions collections) into those clusters. The MongoDB user credentials are baked into the shipped JavaScript, so the author retains read access to every installer's linked WhatsApp session state — sufficient to hijack the linked WhatsApp account. The relay is not disclosed in the README, which only instructs the user to run npm start. The tarball additionally ships offensive tooling aimed at third-party WhatsApp users (a ~150-entry proxy pool in dist/proxies.cjs, batched reaction and socket-spoof flooding in dist/react-engine.cjs, and abuse commands such as perm-ban-num, cortana-ios-crash, realban, massreport); this is operator-directed abuse capability, separate from the installer-side session exfiltration.

---

Credit: [OpenSSF](https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages) ([source](https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages/blob/c19ea3a01baa8c935920324eacf35bf5e92654fb/osv/malicious/npm/cortana-md-engine/MAL-2026-17323.json))

**References:**
- https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages/blob/c19ea3a01baa8c935920324eacf35bf5e92654fb/osv/malicious/npm/cortana-md-engine/MAL-2026-17323.json
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/cortana-md-engine/v/1.4.6
- https://github.com/ossf/malicious-packages/blob/72394477b395764c28acdd932236d25fca79ced6/osv/malicious/npm/cortana-md-engine/MAL-2026-17323.json
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-25rm-w924-v83v

Compromised versions (1)

= 1.4.6

Any computer that installed or ran a compromised version should be considered fully compromised. Rotate every secret on that machine from a clean environment.