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.

> I'm coming to the unfortunate realizattion that supply chain attacks like this are simply baked into the modern JavaScript ecosystem.

I see this odd take a lot - the automatic narrowing of the scope of an attack to the single ecosystem it occurred in most recently, without any real technical argument for doing so.

What's especially concerning is I see this take in the security industry: mitigations put in place to target e.g. NPM, but are then completely absent for PyPi or Crates. It's bizarre not only because it leaves those ecosystems wide open, but also because the mitigation measures would be very similar (so it would be a minimal amount of additional effort for a large benefit).

Which mitigations specifically are in npm but not in crates.io?

As far as I know crates.io has everything that npm has, plus

- strictly immutable versions[1]

- fully automated and no human in the loop perpetual yanking

- no deletions ever

- a public and append only index

Go modules go even further and add automatic checksum verification per default and a cryptographic transparency log.

Contrast this with docker hub for example, where not even npm's basic properties hold.

So, it is more like

docker hub ⊂ npm ⊂ crates.io ⊂ Go modules

[1] Nowadays npm has this arguably too