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

I'm coming to the unfortunate realizattion that supply chain attacks like this are simply baked into the modern JavaScript ecosystem. Vendoring can mitigate your immediate exposure, but does not solve this problem.

These attacks may just be the final push I needed to take server rendering (without js) more seriously. The HTMX folks convinced me that I can get REALLY far without any JavaScript, and my apps will probably be faster and less janky anyway.

Until you go get malware

Supply chain attacks happen at every layer where there is package management or a vector onto the machine or into the code.

What NPM should do if they really give a shit is start requiring 2FA to publish. Require a scan prior to publish. Sign the package with hard keys and signature. Verify all packages installed match signatures. Semver matching isn’t enough. CRC checks aren’t enough. This has to be baked into packages and package management.

If NPM really cared, they'd stop recommending people use their poorly designed version control system that relies on late-fetching third-party components required by the build step, and they'd advise people to pick a reliable and robust VCS like Git for tracking/storing/retrieving source code objects and stick to that. This will never happen.

NPM has also been sending out nag emails for the last 2+ years about 2FA. If anything, that constituted an assist in the attack on the Junon account that we saw a couple weeks ago.

NPM lock files seem to include hashes for integrity checking, so as long as you check the lock file into the VCS, what's the difference?