[mike_hearn]

Their analysis was triggered by open source projects upgrading en-masse and revealing a new anomalous endpoint, so, it does require some pioneers to take the arrows. They didn't spot the problem entirely via static analysis, although with hindsight they could have done (missing GitHub attestation).

[narrator]

A security company could set up a honeypot machine that installs new releases of everything automatically and have a separate machine scan its network traffic for suspicious outbound connections.

[mike_hearn]

The problem is what counts as suspicious. StepSecurity are quite clear in their post that they decide what counts as anomalous by comparing lots of open source runs against prior data, so they can't figure it out on their own.