Fake Coding Tests, Real RATs: Mirage Kitten Hides NodeRabbit and PollCat in Trojanized npm Packages (Kaspersky, 2026-09-10 CISO Daily Digest)

The 2026-09-10 CISO Daily Digest reported Kaspersky's discovery of two previously undocumented cross-platform RATs — NodeRabbit (Node.js) and PollCat (obfuscated JavaScript) — delivered by Mirage Kitten, the Iran-linked APT also tracked as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm and Nimbus Manticore. The group impersonates recruiters on LinkedIn and sends software engineers a time-limited 'coding test' whose project archive, hosted on a legitimate-looking Amazon S3 link, carries trojanized npm packages; candidates who run the assessment (npm i && node index.js) launch the RATs before the recruiter's six-digit access code is ever typed — PollCat starts beaconing the moment the app loads — and the challenge README's ban on AI assistants quietly removes the one reviewer most likely to flag the suspicious import. NodeRabbit talks to command infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure protected with AES-256-GCM, reads system memory, CPU cores and uptime to detect analysis environments, and later samples planted a fake 'GitHub Copilot Helper' VS Code extension plus Git-hook persistence. Victims have been confirmed in Afghanistan, Egypt and Ethiopia. This demo safely reproduces the file stage of that campaign: malicious-package.json is the trojanized assessment project's manifest, carrying the embedded package (represented here by the benign stand-in 'rank-evaluator', shipped as a local unpublished dependency) alongside known-vulnerable pins (lodash 4.17.20, minimist 1.2.5, async 2.6.3); malicious-deps.zip wraps that manifest with the challenge README exactly as the lure archive would travel, and nothing executes — no code runs anywhere. The clean counterpart ships a remediated manifest with only vetted components. MetaDefender SBOM inspects the dependency tree before the project reaches a developer machine — flagging the unvetted package and vulnerable components that carry the supply-chain foothold (MITRE ATT&CK T1195.001 — Supply Chain Compromise: Software Dependencies and Development Tools).