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Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

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

#41
post #32

[flagged]

Why would pinning the exact version in this case not have solved the problem? I agree `--ignore-scripts` would be a sensible default at this point, but my understanding is that this vulnerability exclusively impacts two newly released versions.

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

#42
post #41
post #32

[flagged]

Why would pinning the exact version in this case not have solved the problem? I agree `--ignore-scripts` would be a sensible default at this point, but my understanding is that this vulnerability exclusively impacts two newly released versions.

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

#43

This may not be popular, but is there a place for required human actions or just timed actions to slow down things like this? For instance, maybe a GH action to deploy requires a final human click and to change that to cli has a 3 day cooling period with mandatory security emails sent out. Similarly, you switch to read only for 6 hrs after an email change. There are holes in these ideas but the basic concept is to tr…

Hi, security here. We've tried, but the amount of people you need for this vs the amount of people you have trying to review and click the big button always means that this step will be a bottleneck. Thus this step will be eliminated.

A much better approach would be to pin the versions used and do intentional updates some time after release, say a sprint after.

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

#44
post #13

I can't even imagine the scale of the impact with Axios being compromised, nearly every other project uses it for some reason instead of fetch (I never understood why). Also from the report: > Neither malicious version contains a single line of malicious code inside axios itself. Instead, both inject a fake dependency, plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, a package that is never imported anywhere in the axios source, whose only pu…

[flagged]

From what I can tell, it blocks it everywhere.

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

#47

This may not be popular, but is there a place for required human actions or just timed actions to slow down things like this? For instance, maybe a GH action to deploy requires a final human click and to change that to cli has a 3 day cooling period with mandatory security emails sent out. Similarly, you switch to read only for 6 hrs after an email change. There are holes in these ideas but the basic concept is to tr…

Hi, security here. We've tried, but the amount of people you need for this vs the amount of people you have trying to review and click the big button always means that this step will be a bottleneck. Thus this step will be eliminated. A much better approach would be to pin the versions used and do intentional updates some time after release, say a sprint after.

Yeah, I am looking at that on the use end. It sounds like on the python side this type of thing will be more standard (uv now and soon pip supported with version date requirements). I think time is a big missing element in many security in depth decisions. It can be time until you adopt like use no package newer than xx days or time it takes to deploy etc etc. Unfortunately the ecosystem is getting really diverse and that means ever more sophisticated attacks so we may need to do things that are annoying just to survive.

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

#48

Pin your dependencies folks! Audit and don't upgrade to every brand new version.

But also have a regular review of your dependencies to update them when necessary, because as bad as compromised packages may be things do have vulnerabilities occasionally, and upgrading things that are a long way out-of-date can be quite hard.

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

#49
post #14

Has anyone tested general purpose malware detection on supply chains ? Like clamscan . I tried to test the LiteLLM hack but the affected packages had been pulled. Windows Defender AV has an inference based detector that may work when signatures have not yet been published

I second this question. I usually scan our containers with snyk and guarddog, and have wondered about guarddog in particular because it adds so much build time.

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

#50
Genuinely how are you supposed to make sure that none of the software you have on your system pulls this in?

It’s things like this that make me want to swap to Qubes permanently, simply as to not have my password manager in the same context as compiling software ever.

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