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Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised

(socket.dev)
1208 points jamesberthoty | 1 comments | 16 Sep 25 11:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.383s | source
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madeofpalk ◴[16 Sep 25 11:49 UTC] No.45260948[source]▶
My main takeaway from all of these is to stop using tokens, and rely on mechanisms like OIDC to reduce the blast radius of a compromise.

How many tokens do you have lying around in your home directory in plain text, able to be read by anything on your computer running as your user?

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diggan ◴[16 Sep 25 11:54 UTC] No.45261000[source]▶
> How many tokens do you have lying around in your home directory in plain text, able to be read by anything on your computer running as your user?

Zero? How many developers have plain-text tokens lying around on disk? Avoiding that been hammered into me from every developer more senior than me since I got involved with professional software development.

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mewpmewp2 ◴[16 Sep 25 11:56 UTC] No.45261018[source]▶
How do you manage secrets for your projects?
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diggan ◴[16 Sep 25 11:58 UTC] No.45261045[source]▶
Using a password manager for fetching them when needed. 1Password in my case, but I'm sure any password manager can be used for storing secrets for most programming projects.
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1. mewpmewp2 ◴[16 Sep 25 12:53 UTC] No.45261567[source]▶
I was thinking about one more case, if you are using 1password as a cli tool. Let's say you "op run -- npm dev". If there's a malicious node modules script, it would of course be able to get the env variables you intended to inject, but would it also be able to continue running more op commands to get all your other secrets too if you have started a session?

Edit: Testing 1Password myself, with 1password desktop and shell, if I have authed myself once in shell, then "spawn" would be able to get all of my credentials from 1Password.

So I'm not actually sure how much better than plaintext is that. Unless you use service accounts there.