Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised

As a user of npm-hosted packages in my own projects, I'm not really sure what to do to protect myself. It's not feasible for me to audit every single one of my dependencies, and every one of my dependencies' dependencies, and so on. Even if I had the time to do that, I'm not a typescript/javascript expert, and I'm certain there are a lot of obfuscated things that an attacker could do that I wouldn't realize was embedded malware.

One thing I was thinking of was sort of a "delayed" mode to updating my own dependencies. The idea is that when I want to update my dependencies, instead of updating to the absolute latest version available of everything, it updates to versions that were released no more than some configurable amount of time ago. As a maintainer, I could decide that a package that's been out in the wild for at least 6 weeks is less likely to have unnoticed malware in it than one that was released just yesterday.

Obviously this is not a perfect fix, as there's no guarantee that the delay time I specify is enough for any particular package. And I'd want the tool to present me with options sometimes: e.g. if my current version of a dep has a vulnerability, and the fix for it came out a few days ago, I might choose to update to it (better eliminate the known vulnerability than refuse to update for fear of an unknown one) rather than wait until it's older than my threshold.

The article explicitly mentions a way to do this:

Use NPM Package Cooldown Check

The NPM Cooldown check automatically fails a pull request if it introduces an npm package version that was released within the organization’s configured cooldown period (default: 2 days). Once the cooldown period has passed, the check will clear automatically with no action required. The rationale is simple - most supply chain attacks are detected within the first 24 hours of a malicious package release, and the projects that get compromised are often the ones that rushed to adopt the version immediately. By introducing a short waiting period before allowing new dependencies, teams can reduce their exposure to fresh attacks while still keeping their dependencies up to date.

This attack was only targeting user environments.

Having secrets in a different security context, like root/secretsuser-owned secret files only accessible by the user for certain actions (the simplest way would be eg. sudoers file white listing a precise command like git push), which would prevent arbitrary reads of secrets.

The other part of this attack, creating new github actions, is also a privilege, normal users dont need to exercise that often or unconstrained. There are certainly ways to prevent/restrict that too.

All this "was a supply chain attack" fuzz here is IMO missing the forest for the trees. Changing the security context for these two actions is easier to implement than supply chain analysis and this basic approach is more reliable than trusting the community to find a backdoor before you apply the update. Its security 101. Sure, there are post-install scripts that can attack the system but that is a whole different game.