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: 0.199s | source

A lot of blogs on this are AI generated and such as this is developing, so just linking to a bunch of resources out there:

Socket:

- Sep 15 (First post on breach): https://socket.dev/blog/tinycolor-supply-chain-attack-affect...

- Sep 16: https://socket.dev/blog/ongoing-supply-chain-attack-targets-...

StepSecurity – https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/ctrl-tinycolor-and-40-npm-p...

Aikido - https://www.aikido.dev/blog/s1ngularity-nx-attackers-strike-...

Ox - https://www.ox.security/blog/npm-2-0-hack-40-npm-packages-hi...

Safety - https://www.getsafety.com/blog-posts/shai-hulud-npm-attack

Phoenix - https://phoenix.security/npm-tinycolor-compromise/

Semgrep - https://semgrep.dev/blog/2025/security-advisory-npm-packages...

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

>>45260741 (OP) #

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]▶

>>45261026 #

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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WD-42 ◴[16 Sep 25 13:46 UTC] No.45262220[source]▶

>>45261970 #

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

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1. lupusreal ◴[16 Sep 25 16:29 UTC] No.45264429[source]▶

>>45262220 #

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

Call me crazy but I think agentic coding tools may soon make it practical for people to not be bogged down by the tedium of implementing the same basic crap over and over again, without having to resort to third party dependencies.

I have a little pavucontrol replacement I'm walking Claude Code through. It wanted to use pulsectl but, to see what it could do, I told it no. Write your own bindings to libpulse instead. A few minutes later it had that working. It can definitely write crap like leftpad.

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