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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: 0s | source
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codemonkey-zeta ◴[16 Sep 25 11:56 UTC] No.45261026[source]▶
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.

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jeswin ◴[16 Sep 25 13:27 UTC] No.45261970[source]▶
Traditional JS is actually among the safest environments ever created. Every day, billions of devices run untrusted JS code, and no other platform has seen sandboxed execution at such scale. And in nearly three decades, there have been very few incidents of large successful attacks on browser engines. That makes the JS engine derived from browsers the perfect tool to build a server side framework out of.

However, processes and practices around NodeJS and npm are in dire need of a security overhaul. leftpad is a cultural problem that needs to be addressed. To start with, snippets don't need to be on npm.

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1. mewpmewp2 ◴[16 Sep 25 13:47 UTC] No.45262223[source]▶
Interestingly AI should be able to help a lot with desire to load those snippets.

What I'm wondering if it would help the ecosystem, if you were able to rather load raw snippets into your codebase, and source control as opposed to having them as dependencies.

So e.g. shadcn component pasting approach.

For things like leftPad, cli colors and others you would just load raw typescript code from a source, and there you would immediately notice something malicious or during code reviews.

You would leave actual npm packages to only actual frameworks / larger packages where this doesn't make sense and expect higher scrutiny, multi approvals of releases there.