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.

pnpm just added this: https://pnpm.io/blog/releases/10.16

This sounds nice in theory, but does it really solve the issue? I think that if no one's installing that package then no one is noticing the malware and no one is reporting that package either. It merely slightly improves the chances that author would notice a version they didn't release, but this doesn't work if author is not particularly actively working the compromised project.