I’ve come across some troubling news regarding the NPM package ‘is,’ which is downloaded about 2.8 million times weekly. It appears that this package has been compromised with malware that is affecting developers who incorporate it into their projects.
This situation is alarming, especially since so many rely on this library. I’m interested to know if anyone has additional information on what transpired. How did the malware make its way into this package initially? What steps should we take if we’ve utilized it in our own code?
Additionally, I’m looking for ways to safeguard ourselves against similar incidents moving forward. Should we be more vigilant with our dependencies or employ security scanning tools? Any recommendations would be appreciated, as this type of supply chain attack seems to be on the rise.
Been in supply chain security for years and this incident shows a huge gap in package verification. The ‘is’ library got compromised through stolen credentials or social engineering - attackers target these utility packages because they’re everywhere but barely monitored. What scares me is how long malicious code can hide in popular dependencies. I’m now using Socket Security to monitor dependencies for behavioral changes between versions. Set up automated alerts for weird network activity during builds too. We can’t manually check every dependency, but we can monitor better and have rollback plans ready. Use npm ci instead of npm install in production - it ensures reproducible builds from your lockfile.
Exactly why I tightened up my dependency management after getting burned last year. Attackers usually compromise maintainer accounts or exploit weak publishing processes. First, check your package-lock.json against known compromised versions and audit your build artifacts for suspicious network calls or file changes. I’d throw npm audit and Snyk into your CI pipeline - they’ve saved us from several sketchy packages before hitting production. Popular packages with minimal code like ‘is’ are perfect targets because they’re everywhere but nobody’s really watching them security-wise. Ask yourself if you actually need these micro-dependencies or if you can just use native JavaScript instead. Sometimes the security risk isn’t worth the convenience.
damn this is scary stuff. heard about this from a colleague yesterday and immediately ran checks on our projects. turns out we were using an older version so dodged that bullet but still makes you think twice about trusting packages blindly. might be worth pinning exact versions instead of using ^ ranges to avoid auto-updates pulling in compromised code.