Prisma False Positives & The Shai-Hulud Worm

Over the last 48 hours, our security team has tracked an influx of community chatter regarding automated alerts flagging common development dependencies specifically ⁠prisma⁠ as variants of the Shai-Hulud / Miasma credential stealing worm.

As a digital infrastructure provider, NodeByte is issuing this advisory to help our users separate active supply chain threats from recent upstream tooling false positives.

1. The Real Threat: The Shai-Hulud (Miasma) Campaign

The Shai-Hulud worm family (and its latest heavily obfuscated variant, Miasma) is an active, highly aggressive supply chain campaign targeting ⁠npm⁠ and ⁠PyPI⁠ ecosystems. Recent high-profile compromises include targeted waves within the ⁠@redhat-cloud-services⁠ and ⁠@tanstack⁠ namespaces.

• How it operates: The worm executes during ⁠npm install⁠ via post-install scripts. It systematically scrapes the local environment or CI/CD pipeline for AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub, and Kubernetes credentials.
• The Spread: If valid tokens are found, it automatically hijacks the victim’s identity to publish malicious downstream packages or create public repositories under their account to exfiltrate data. If it fails to find credentials, some variants attempt directory wiping payloads.

2. The Current Confusion: Prisma & Microsoft Defender

Many developers are currently reporting that Windows Defender is blocking local database migrations or locking up the Prisma ORM CLI (specifically affecting ⁠prisma⁠ versions 7.7.0 and 7.8.0), attributing it to a Shai-Hulud infection.

*This specific Prisma flag is an upstream False Positive. Microsoft recently pushed a broad heuristic signature update to catch polymorphic Miasma scripts, which accidentally matched benign, authentic code within official Prisma packages. Independent audits of the official Prisma releases have confirmed no malicious code is present. However, because Defender quarantines the binaries, local execution (⁠prisma db push⁠, ⁠prisma migrate⁠) is actively failing for many teams.

How to Clear and Update Defender

If Windows Defender has quarantined your Prisma binaries and is actively blocking commands like ⁠prisma db push⁠ or ⁠prisma migrate⁠, Microsoft has provided the following official steps to clear the cached false positive detection and pull down the clean malware definitions.

1. Open your Command Prompt (cmd) as an Administrator.
2. Change your directory to the Windows Defender folder by running:

cd c:\Program Files\Windows Defender

3. Purge the broken dynamic signatures and cached definitions from your device:

MpCmdRun.exe -removedefinitions -dynamicsignatures

4. Force Defender to pull down the newly corrected signature definition file:

MpCmdRun.exe -SignatureUpdate
   

Once completed, your local engine binaries should be cleared, allowing your Prisma migrations and deployment pipelines to run normally without throwing security errors.

• Fix/Post Source: Prisma Issue #29636

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General Supply Chain Best Practices

While this specific Prisma flag was a false alarm, we strongly advise development teams to remain vigilant regarding general package ecosystem health:

1. Avoid Broad Whitelisting: While the Prisma flag was an error, we strongly advise against whitelisting your entire node_modules/ or workspace directory to resolve it. Doing so exposes your environment to actual supply chain risks. Use the MpCmdRun.exe utility shown above instead.
2. Maintain Credential Hygiene: Ensure your deployment pipelines utilize short-lived, scoped tokens (like OIDC role assumption) rather than hardcoded root cloud credentials in your .env files.
3. Audit Repository Activity: Periodically review active authorization tokens and check your public GitHub organization profiles to ensure no rogue repositories or package releases have been published unexpectedly.

NodeByte will continue monitoring edge telemetry and downstream package registries to ensure our hosting environments remain secure. If you have questions regarding your specific infrastructure deployment, please reach out to our support team.