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.

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.

Javascript doesn't have a standard library, until it does the 170 million[1] weekly downloads of packages like UUID will continue. You can't expect people to re-write everything over and over.

[1]https://www.npmjs.com/package/uuid

You have the DOM and Node APIs. Which I think cover more than C library or Common Lisp library. Adding direct dependencies is done by every project. The issue is the sprawling deps tree of NPM and JS culture.

> You can't expect people to re-write everything over and over.

That’s the excuse everyone is giving, then you see thousands of terminal libraries and calendar pickers.

When I was learning JS/node/npm as a total programming newbie, a lot of the advice online was basically “if you write your own version of foobar when foobar is already available as an npm package, you’re stupid for wasting your time”.

I’d never worked in any other ecosystem, and I wish I realized that advice was specific to JS culture

It's not really bad advice, it just has different implications in Javascript.

In other languages, you'd have a few dependencies on larger libraries providing related functionality, where the Javascript culture is to use a bunch of tiny libraries to give the same functionality.