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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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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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silverwind ◴[16 Sep 25 16:05 UTC] No.45264113[source]▶
So, who is going to audit the thousands of new packages/versions that are published to npm every day? It only works for Debian because they hand-pick popular software.
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1. jonhohle ◴[16 Sep 25 17:52 UTC] No.45265494[source]▶
Maybe NPM should hand pick popular packages and we should get away from this idea of every platform should always let everyone publish. Curation is expensive, but it may be worthwhile for mature platforms.