Not much we didn't know (you're basically SOL since an owner was compromised), however we now have a small peek into the actual meat of the social engineering, which is the only interesting news imho: https://github.com/axios/axios/issues/10636#issuecomment-418...
jasonsaayman and voxpelli had useful write ups from the "head on a swivel" perspective of what to watch out for. Jason mentioned "the meeting said something on my system was out of date." they were using Microsoft meeting and that's how they got RCE. Would love more color on that.
An owner being compromised is absolutely survivable on a responsibly run FOSS project with proper commit/review/push signing.
This and every other recent supply chain attack was completely preventable.
So much so I am very comfortable victim blaming at this point.
This is absolutely on the Axios team.
Go setup some smartcards for signing git push/commit and publish those keys widely, and mandate signed merge commits so nothing lands on main without two maintainer sigs, and no more single points of failure.
The fetch api has been widely available in browsers for a decade now. And in node since 18. A competent developer could whip up a more axios-like library with fetch in a day easily. You can do all the cool things like interceptors with fetch too.
Yet most developers I work with just use it reflexively. This seems like one of the biggest issues with the npm ecosystem - the complete lack of motivation to write even trivial things yourself.
The interesting detail from this thread is that every legitimate v1 release had OIDC provenance attestations and the malicious one didn't, but nobody checks. Even simpler, if you're diffing your lockfile between deploys, a brand new dependency appearing in a patch release is a pretty obvious red flag.
Looks like a very sophisticated operation, and I feel for the maintainer who had his machine compromised.
The next incarnation of this, I worry, is that the malware hibernates somehow (e.g., if (Date.now() < 1776188434046) { exit(); }) to maximize the damage.
Any good payload analysis been published yet? Really curious if this was just a one and done info stealer or if it potentially could have clawed its way deeper into affected systems.
This is why I've moved to native fetch for most projects. The fewer dependencies in the chain, the smaller the attack surface. For API clients especially,
fetch + a thin wrapper is usually enough.
> something on my system was out of date. i installed the missing item
Given the "extreme vigilance" of the primitive "don't install unknown something on your machine" level is unattainable, can there really be an effective project-level solutions?
Mandatory involvement of more people to hope not everyone installs random stuff, at least not at same time? (though you might not even have more people...)
Seems to me the root of the problem was that the guy was using the same device for all sorts of stuff.
Seems to me that one drastic tactic NPM could employ to prevent attacks like this is to use hardware security. NPM could procure and configure laptops with identity rooted in the laptop TPM instead of 2FA. Configure the NPM servers so that for certain repos only updates signed with the private key in the laptop TPM can be pushed to NPM. Each high profile repo would have certain laptops that can upload for that repo. Set up the laptop with a minimal version of Linux with just the command line tools to upload to NPM, not even a browser or desktop environment. Give those laptops to maintainers of high profile repos for free to use for updates.
Then at update time, the maintainer just transfers the code from their dev machine to the secure laptop via USB drive or CD and pushes to NPM from the special laptop.
Adding postinstall should require approval from NPM.
NPM clients should not install freshly published packages.
NPM packages should be scanned after publishing.
High profile packages should verify upstream git hash signature.
NPM install should run in sandbox and detect any attempt to install outside project directory.
But npm being part of multi trillion company cannot be bothered to fix any of these. Instead they push for tighter integration with GitHub with UX that suck.
I never understood why all the CAS tutorials pushed axios. This was before vite and build-scripts was how you did react. After the compromise I reviewed some projects and converted them to pure JS fetch and vite.
The interesting detail from the GitHub thread is shaanmajid's observation that every legitimate v1 release had OIDC provenance attestations and the malicious one didn't, but nobody checks. Even simpler, if you're diffing your lockfile between deploys, a brand new dependency appearing in a patch release is a pretty obvious red flag without needing any attestation infrastructure.
this is why i pin every dependency hash in my python projects. pip install --require-hashes with a locked requirements file catches exactly this, if the package hash changes unexpectedly the install fails. surprised this isn't the default in the npm ecosystem
I ask this on every supply chain security fail: Can we please mandate signing packages? Or at least commits?
NPM rejected PRs to support optional signing multiple times more than a decade ago now, and this choice has not aged well.
Anyone that cannot take 5 minutes to set up commit signing with a $40 usb smartcard to prevent impersonation has absolutely no business writing widely depended upon FOSS software.
142 comments
This and every other recent supply chain attack was completely preventable.
So much so I am very comfortable victim blaming at this point.
This is absolutely on the Axios team.
Go setup some smartcards for signing git push/commit and publish those keys widely, and mandate signed merge commits so nothing lands on main without two maintainer sigs, and no more single points of failure.
Yet most developers I work with just use it reflexively. This seems like one of the biggest issues with the npm ecosystem - the complete lack of motivation to write even trivial things yourself.
The next incarnation of this, I worry, is that the malware hibernates somehow (e.g., if (Date.now() < 1776188434046) { exit(); }) to maximize the damage.
I feel like npm specifically needs to up their game on SA of malicious code embedded in public projects.
> March 31, around 01:00 UTC: community members file issues reporting the compromise. The attacker deletes them using the compromised account.
Interesting it got caught when it did.
> something on my system was out of date. i installed the missing item
Given the "extreme vigilance" of the primitive "don't install unknown something on your machine" level is unattainable, can there really be an effective project-level solutions?
Mandatory involvement of more people to hope not everyone installs random stuff, at least not at same time? (though you might not even have more people...)
Seems to me that one drastic tactic NPM could employ to prevent attacks like this is to use hardware security. NPM could procure and configure laptops with identity rooted in the laptop TPM instead of 2FA. Configure the NPM servers so that for certain repos only updates signed with the private key in the laptop TPM can be pushed to NPM. Each high profile repo would have certain laptops that can upload for that repo. Set up the laptop with a minimal version of Linux with just the command line tools to upload to NPM, not even a browser or desktop environment. Give those laptops to maintainers of high profile repos for free to use for updates.
Then at update time, the maintainer just transfers the code from their dev machine to the secure laptop via USB drive or CD and pushes to NPM from the special laptop.
Adding postinstall should require approval from NPM. NPM clients should not install freshly published packages. NPM packages should be scanned after publishing. High profile packages should verify upstream git hash signature. NPM install should run in sandbox and detect any attempt to install outside project directory.
But npm being part of multi trillion company cannot be bothered to fix any of these. Instead they push for tighter integration with GitHub with UX that suck.
NPM rejected PRs to support optional signing multiple times more than a decade ago now, and this choice has not aged well.
Anyone that cannot take 5 minutes to set up commit signing with a $40 usb smartcard to prevent impersonation has absolutely no business writing widely depended upon FOSS software.
Normalized negligence is still negligence.