[jefozabuss]

Seems like people already forgot about Jia Tan.

By the way why doesn't npm have already a system in place to flag sketchy releases where most of the code looks normal and there is a newly added obfuscated code with hexadecimal variable names and array lookups for execution...

[mystifyingpoi]

Detecting sketchy-looking hex codes should be pretty straightforward, but then I imagine there are ways to make sketchy code non-sketchy, which would be immediately used. I can imagine a big JS function, that pretends to do legit data manip, but in the process creates the payload.

[hombre_fatal]

Yeah, It’s merely a fluke that the malware author used some crappy online obfuscator that created those hex code variables. It would have been less work and less suspicious if they just kept their original semantic variables like “originalFetch”.

[nicce]

It is just about bringing the classic non-signature based antivirus software to the release cycle. Hard to say how useful it is, but usually it is endless cat-and-mouse play like with everything else.

[Cthulhu_]

It wouldn't be just one signal, but several - like a mere patch version that adds several kilobytes of code, long lines, etc. Or a release after a long silent period.

[cluckindan]

A complexity per line check would have flagged it.

Even a max line length check would have flagged it.

[chatmasta]

That would flag a huge percentage of JS packages that ship with minified code.

[cluckindan]

Why would you be including minified code in a build? That’s just bad practice and makes development-time debugging more difficult.

[saghm]

It's not like minified JS can't be parsed and processed as AST. You could still pretty easily split up each statement/assignment to check the length of each one individually.

[jay_kyburz]

How are people verifying their dependencies if they are minified?

[SethTro]

That's the magic part, they aren't

[chatmasta]

My guy… in the JS ecosystem a “lock file” is something that restricts your package installer to an arbitrary range of packages, i.e. no restrictions at all and completely unpredictable. You have to go out of your way to “pin” a package to a specific version.

[Izkata]

Lockfiles use exact hashes, not versions/version ranges. Javascript projects use two files, a package file with version ranges (used when upgrading) and a lockfile with the exact version (used in general when installing in an existing project).

[cchance]

Feels like a basic light weight 3b AI model could easily spot shit like this on commit

[tom1337]

It would also be great if a release needs to be approved by the maintainer via a second factor or an E-Mail verification. Once a release has been published to npm, you have an hour to verify it by clicking a link in an email and then enter another 2FA (separate OTP than for login, Passkey, Yubikey whatever). That would also prevent publishing with lost access keys. If you do not verify the release within the first hour it gets deleted and never published.

[naugtur]

That's why we never went with using keys in CI for publishing. Local machine publishing requires a 2fa.

automated publishing should use something like Pagerduty to signal that a version is being published to a group of maintainers and it requires an approval to go through. And any one of them can veto within 5 minutes.

But we don't have that, so gotta be careful and prepare for the worst (use LavaMoat for that)

[Cthulhu_]

Not through e-mail links though, that's what caused this in the first place. E-mail notification, sure, but they should also do a phishing training mail - make it legit, but if people press the link they need to be told that NPM will never send them an email with a link.

[dist-epoch]

> flag sketchy releases

Because the malware writers will keep tweaking the code until it passes that check, just like virus writers submit their viruses to VirusTotal until they are undetected.

[galaxy_gas]

its Typical that the Virus Writer will use their own service, there is criminal virustotal-clones that run many AV in VM and return the Results, because virustotal will share all binaries, anything upload in Virustotal will be detteceted shortly if it is not.

[47282847]

Isn’t it still that when signatures are added at some point it turns out that the malware code has been uploaded months before, or did that change?

[AtNightWeCode]

The problem is that it is even possible to push builds from dev machines.

[madeofpalk]

With NPM now supporting OIDC, you can just turn this off now https://docs.npmjs.com/trusted-publishers

[hulitu]

> By the way why doesn't npm have already a system in place to flag sketchy releases

Because nobody gives a fsck. Normally, after npm was filled with malware, people would avoid it. But it seems that nobody (distro maintainers) cares. People get what they asked for (malware).