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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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codemonkey-zeta ◴[16 Sep 25 11:56 UTC] No.45261026[source]▶
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.

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lucideer ◴[16 Sep 25 12:21 UTC] No.45261265[source]▶
> 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).

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WD-42 ◴[16 Sep 25 13:30 UTC] No.45262010[source]▶
I mostly agree. But NPM is special, in that the exposure is so much higher. The hypothetical python+htmx web app might have 10s of dependencies (including transitive) whereas your typical Javascript/React will have 1000s. All an attacker needs to do is find one of many packages like TinyColor or Leftpad or whatever and now loads of projects are compromised.
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johnisgood ◴[16 Sep 25 14:07 UTC] No.45262453[source]▶
Well, your typical Rust project has over 1000 dependencies, too. Zed has over 2000 in release mode.
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Klonoar ◴[16 Sep 25 17:16 UTC] No.45265047[source]▶
Your typical Rust project does not have over 1000 dependencies.

Zed is not a typical Rust project; it's a full fledged editor that includes a significant array of features and its own homegrown UI framework.

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worik ◴[16 Sep 25 21:01 UTC] No.45267992[source]▶
What is a "typical Rust project", I wonder?
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cesarb ◴[16 Sep 25 22:04 UTC] No.45268783[source]▶
One famous example is ripgrep (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep). Its Cargo.lock (which contains all direct and indirect dependencies) lists 65 dependencies (it has 66 entries, but one of them is for itself).
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1. johnisgood ◴[17 Sep 25 15:31 UTC] No.45277060{7}[source]▶
Not quite. He is a better developer than most who happen to minimize dependencies, but according to my experiences it is not as common as you would like to believe. Do I really need to make a list of all the Rust projects I have compiled that pulled in over 1000 dependencies? If I need to do it to convince you, I will do so, as my time allows.