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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: 0.342s | 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. cuillevel3 ◴[16 Sep 25 23:45 UTC] No.45269777[source]▶
Distros are struggling with the amount of packages they have to maintain and update regularly. That's one of the main reasons why languages built their own ecosystems in the first place. It became popular with CPAN and Maven and took off with Ruby gems.

Linux distros can't even provide all the apps users want, that's why freshmeat existed and we have linuxbrew, flatpak, Ubuntu multiverse, PPA, third party Debian repositories, the openSUSE Buildservice, the AUR, ...

There is no community that has the capacity to audit and support multiple branches of libraries.