[dns_snek]

Whenever I read this well-meaning advice I have to ask: Do you actually read hundreds of thousands of lines of code (or more) that NPM installed?

Because the workflow for 99.99% of developers is something resembling:

1. git clone

2. npm install (which pulls in a malicious dependency but disabling post-install scripts saved you for now!)

3. npm run (executing your malicious dependency, you're now infected)

The only way this advice helps you is if you also insert "audit the entirety of node_modules" in between steps 2 and 3 which nobody does.

[IshKebab]

Yeah I guess it probably helps you specifically, because most malware is going to do the lazy thing and use install scripts. But it doesn't help everyone in general because if e.g. NPM disabled those scripts entirely (or made them opt-in) then the malware authors would just put their malware into the `npm run` as you say.

[dns_snek]

Indeed it may save you in case the malware is being particularly lazy but I think it may do more harm than good by giving people a false sense of security and it can also break packages that use post-install scrips for legitimate reasons.

For anyone who actually cares about supply chain attacks, the minimum you should be doing is running untrusted code in some sort of a sandbox that doesn't have access to important credentials like SSH keys, like a dev container of some sort.

You would still need to audit the code otherwise you might ship a backdoor to production but it would at least protect you against a developer machine compromise... unless you get particularly unlucky and it also leverages a container escape 0-day, but that's secure enough for me personally.