Live data from Hacker News

Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

stepsecurity.io

151–160 of 894 posts

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#151
In light of these nonstop supply chain attacks: Tonight I created /supply-chain-audit -- A simple claude code skill that fetches info on the latest major package vulnerability, then scans your entire ~/ and gives you a report on all your projects.

https://github.com/IsaacGemal/claude-skills

It's a bit janky right now but I'd be interested to hear what people think about it.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because no other language has ever had supply chain attacks ever, in history. Nope. https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/05/10/malicious-crate-rustde... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-12-11-ultralytics-attack-an... https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-catches-mongodb-go-modu... https://www.reversinglabs.com/blog/packagist-php-repo-supply...

Log4Shell was hardly a supply-chain attack - just a latent bug in a widely-used library. That can happen anywhere. Maven to this day represents my ideal of package distribution. Immutable versions save so much trouble and I really don't understand why, in the age of left-pad, other people looked at that and said, "nah, I'm good with this."

The semantics are irrelevant. The effect is what's important: Hijacking widely used software to exploit systems. The OC is somehow under the illusion that avoiding JS altogether is a silver bullet for avoiding this.

Forest > Trees

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#153
post #151

In light of these nonstop supply chain attacks: Tonight I created /supply-chain-audit -- A simple claude code skill that fetches info on the latest major package vulnerability, then scans your entire ~/ and gives you a report on all your projects. https://github.com/IsaacGemal/claude-skills It's a bit janky right now but I'd be interested to hear what people think about it.

Skills are great attack vector as well.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#154

Package managers are a failed experiment. We have libraries like SQLite, which is a single .c file that you drag into your project and it immediately does a ton of incredibly useful, non-trivial work for you, while barely increasing your executable's size. The issue is not dependencies themselves, it's transitive ones. Nobody installs left-pad or is-even-number directly, and "libraries" like these are the vast majori…

Package managers are now basically a requirement for language adoption. Doing it manually is not a solution, in an automated world.

What is a problem is library quality. Which is downstream of nobody getting paid for it, combined with an optimistic but unrealistic "all packages are equal" philosophy.

> High quality C libraries

> OpenSSL

OpenSSL is one of the ones where there's a ground up rewrite happening because the code quality is so terrible while being security critical.

On the other end, javascript is uniquely bad because of the deployment model and difficulty of adding things to the standard library, so everything is littered with polyfills.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#155

Package managers are a failed experiment. We have libraries like SQLite, which is a single .c file that you drag into your project and it immediately does a ton of incredibly useful, non-trivial work for you, while barely increasing your executable's size. The issue is not dependencies themselves, it's transitive ones. Nobody installs left-pad or is-even-number directly, and "libraries" like these are the vast majori…

I'd really like to see package managers organized around rings where a very small core of incredibly important stuff is kept in ring 0, ring 1 gets a slightly wider amount of stuff and can only depend on ring 0 dependencies and then ring 2+ is the crapware libraries that infect most ecosystems. But maybe that's not the right fit either. The world where package managers are just open to whatever needs to die. It's no…

Malicious actor KPI: affect a Ring 0 package.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#156

Not to beat a dead horse but I see this again and again with dependencies. Each time I get more worried that the same will happen with rust. I understand the fat std library approach won’t work but I really still want a good solution where I can trust packages to be safe and high quality.

An alternative: - copy the dependencies' tests into your own tests - copy the code in to your codebase as a library using the same review process you would for code from your own team - treat updates to the library in the same way you would for updates to your own code Apparently, this extra work will now not be a problem, because we have AI making us 10x more efficient. To be honest, even without AI, we should've be…

Just going to put features on hold for a month while I review the latest changes to ffmpeg.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#157

Package managers are a failed experiment. We have libraries like SQLite, which is a single .c file that you drag into your project and it immediately does a ton of incredibly useful, non-trivial work for you, while barely increasing your executable's size. The issue is not dependencies themselves, it's transitive ones. Nobody installs left-pad or is-even-number directly, and "libraries" like these are the vast majori…

For some reason, NPM is the only ecosystem with substantial issues with supply-chain attacks.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Side note, it's wild that npm, bun, and pnpm have all decided to use different time units for this configuration.) First day with javascript?

You mean first 86,400 seconds?

You have to admire the person who designed the flexibility to have 87239 seconds not be old enough, but 87240 to be fine.

Re: Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

#159

I recommend everyone to use bwrap if you're on linux and alias all package managers / anything that has post build logic with it. I have bwrap configured to override: npm, pip, cargo, mvn, gradle, everything you can think of and I only give it the access it needs, strip anything that is useless to it anyway, deny dbus, sockets, everything. SSH is forwarded via socket (ssh-add). This limits the blast radius to your CW…

Check also https://github.com/wrr/drop which is a higher-level tool than bwrap. It allows you to make such isolated sandboxes with minimal configuration.
Post reply on HN