Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alarm about what has been described as "malicious activity" in newly published versions of node-ipc. According to Socket and StepSecurity, three different versions of the npm package have been confirmed as malicious -

node-ipc@9.1.6 node-ipc@9.2.3 node-ipc@12.0.1

"Early analysis indicates that node-ipc@9.1.6, node-ipc@9.2.3, and node-ipc@12.0.1