Open source malware is a “nation-state business model”, Sonatype said pithily in its “State of the Software Supply Chain” report for 2026.

Per that report: “Attackers are exploiting high-trust open source ecosystems. 

“Malware campaigns are increasingly optimized for developer workflows, targeting credentials, CI secrets, and build environments. State-linked activity shows that these tactics are not just opportunistic, they are strategic…”

There’s no shortage of victims – just ask GitHub, or less significantly, OpenAI.

APTs, script kiddies and OSS worms

The evidence bears Sonatype’s view out; APTs are rubbing shoulders with financially motivated script kiddies on the outer reaches of npm and other OSS code repositories – even as they scramble to improve safeguards.

One example from just the past few days: Microsoft Threat Intelligence attributing the latest npm package compromise to a North Korean APT.

The threat group, dubbed Sapphire Sleet, successfully, if briefly, compromised 140 ‘Mastra’ packages (Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents and RAG pipelines) and injected malware that ensured “login persistence on all three major operating systems.”

(Sonatype said it spotted 454,600 new malicious packages in 2025 across npm, PyPI, Maven Central, NuGet, and Hugging Face amid “sustained, industrialized campaigns against the people and tooling that build software.”)

A Magic Quadrant, here to help lazy CISOs!

To CISOs grappling with this increasingly visible and active threat landscape, and not finding the guidance in the likes of the S2C2 Framework quite enough, there’s now a Magic Quadrant for Software Supply Chain Security. 

There’s eight “leaders” and 18 companies represented in Gartner’s perennially controversial, yet still closely watched MQ research report.

SSCS ftw

Gartner defines software supply chain security (SSCS) tools as toolkits that use a mix of threat intelligence, software composition analysis, software bills of materials and third-party governance to “identify risk and ensure software integrity from acquisition through delivery… improving DevSecOps maturity.”

In alphabetical order, Apiiro, Black Duck, Chainguard, Checkmarx, Cycode, JFrog, Sonatype, OX Security take the coveted top right hand corner. 

Arnica, ActiveState, Endor Labs, FOSSA, GitHub, Mend.io, Lineaje, RapidFort, Reversing Labs, and Veracode also get a name-check in the report.  

The leaders get some pointed criticism too. A few samples below.

Chainguard, Gartner says, “offers limited support for in-IDE inspection or in-line remediation workflows” and “provides little flexibility to consume arbitrary upstream packages” and customers will get “tightly coupled to its build-from-source Chainguard Factory, curated artifact catalog, and continuous rebuild workflows, creating a risk of vendor lock-in.”

Meanwhile “Checkmarx’s subscription-based and forthcoming consumption-based pricing is higher than average compared to vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Customers should validate long-term cost predictability as AI-driven remediation and agent-based features increase utilization…”

And “Sonatype is lacking… features, including software pipeline security posture, developer workspace security and secrets detection…”

Purists will argue that some of these companies differ so vastly in proposition that they almost don’t belong in the same Magic Quadrant, but as a useful research point for the CISO belatedly looking to improve their security posture when it comes to open source software consumption, it may be worth a read. Most of the vendors above have provided a free version. Here’s a non-gated one.

Your views on this new MQ? Is it comparing Apples and Apples? We’re always interested in hearing from readers. 

Pop me a line on ed@thestack.technology