SAN FRANCISCO, CA - In the wake of a devastating supply chain attack in the npm registry that left millions of enterprise applications compromised and billions of user records exposed, developers across the JavaScript ecosystem expressed deep sorrow today, lamenting that such a crisis was completely unavoidable.
“It’s a shame, but what can you do? This is just the price of building modern web apps,” said Senior Frontend Engineer Mark Vance, echoing the sentiments of a community that completely relies on a 40-level-deep nested tree of unvetted packages maintained by pseudonymous strangers to capitalize a single string. “There’s absolutely no way to foresee or prevent someone from taking over a long-abandoned utility package and injecting a crypto-miner into every production build in the world. It’s just an act of nature.”
I made a wrapp er script named npm on my $PATH that passes input to pnpm instead because of this. I don’t think my team is ready to adopt something like that, but it seems to be working okay so far. Nobody has complained.
I made a wrapp er script named
npmon my $PATH that passes input topnpminstead because of this. I don’t think my team is ready to adopt something like that, but it seems to be working okay so far. Nobody has complained.Npm repos violate iso27002. So, it’s out. And we remember why iso27002 is important when we see news like this.