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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: 0.211s | source
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Meneth ◴[16 Sep 25 12:25 UTC] No.45261303[source]▶
This happens because there's no auditing of new packages or versions. The distro's maintainer and the developer is the same person.

The general solution is to do what Debian does.

Keep a stable distro where new packages aren't added and versions change rarely (security updates and bugfixes only, no new functionality). This is what most people use.

Keep a testing/unstable distro where new packages and new versions can be added, but even then added only by the distro maintainer, NOT by the package developers. This is where the audits happen.

NPM, Python, Rust, Go, Ruby all suffer from this problem, because they have centralized and open package repositories.

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1. f33d5173 ◴[16 Sep 25 16:10 UTC] No.45264189[source]▶
You can use debian's version of your npm packages if you'd like. The issues you're likely to run into are: some libraries won't be packaged period by debian; those that are might be on unacceptably old versions. You can work around these issues by vendoring dependencies that aren't in your distro's repo, ie copying a particular version into your own source control, manually keeping up with security updates. This is, to my knowledge, what large tech companies do. Other companies that don't are either taking a known risk with regards to vulnerabilities, or are ignorant. Ignorance is very common in this industry.