My worst nightmare is to wake up, see an email like that and hastily try to recover it while still 90% asleep, compromising my account in the process.
However, I think I can still sleep safe considering I'm using a password manager that only shows up when I'm on the right domain. A 2FA phishing email sending me to some unknown domain wouldn't show my password manager on the site, and would hence give me a moment to consider what's happening. I'm wondering if the author here wasn't using any sort of password manager, or something slipped through anyways?
Regardless, fucking sucks to end up there, at least it ends up being a learned lesson for more than just one person, hopefully. I sure get more careful every time it happens in the ecosystem.
I generally recommend Google's to any Android users, since it suggests your saved password not only based on domain in Chrome browser, but also based on registered appID for native apps, to extend your point. I'm not sure if third party password managers do this, although perhaps it's possible for anti-monopoly reasons?
It does happen, yes, it's not terrifying.
There was no way to quickly visualize that the site was fake, because it was in fact, "actually" amazon.com.
Phishing sucks. Sorry to read about this.
Edit: To other readers, yes, the exploit failed to use an additional TLS attack, which was how I noticed something was wrong. Otherwise, the site was identical. This was many years ago before browsers were as vocal as they are now about unsecured connections.
If someone hijacked your DNS, they could direct your browser to connect to their web server instead which served a phishing site on port 80 and never redirected you, thus never ran into the certificate issue. That's part of the reason why browsers started warning users when they're connecting to a website without HTTPS.
There are a handful of important packages that are controlled by people who have consulting / commercial interests in OSS activity. These people have an incentive to inflate download numbers.
There could be a collective push to move off these deps, but it takes effort and nobody has a strong incentive to be the first
Debug, chalk, ansi-styles?
---
You can pretend like this is unique to JS ecosystem, but xz was compromised for 3 years.
Okay, but you're not suggesting that a compression algorithm is the same scale as "is-arrayish". I don't think everyone should need to reimplement LZMA but installing a library to determine if a value is an array is bordering on satire.
But it's all one author.
That being said, let's take color printing in terminal as an example. In any sane environment how complicated would that package have to be, and how much work would you expect it to take to maintain? To me the answer is "not much" and "basically never." There are pretty-print libraries for OS terminals written in compiled languages from 25 years ago that still work just fine.
So, what else is wrong with javascript dev where something as simple as coloring console text has 32 releases and 58 github contributors?
I see a new CLI graphics library on HN every other week.
https://github.com/fatih/color (Go) has 23 releases and 39 contributors.
https://github.com/BurntSushi/termcolor (Rust) has 173 contributors.
A comprehensive library might offer a more neat DX, but you'd have to ship library code you don't use. (Yes, tree-shaking exists, but still is tricky and not widespread.)
It helps, but not as much as judicious imports. I've been using Deno more for my personal projects which does have a pretty good @std library, though I do think they should keep methods that simply pass through to the Deno runtime, and should probably support working in Node and Bun as well.
On the server side, of course, you can do whatever you like, see Node / Deno / Bun. But the code bundle size plays a minor role there.
Say there is neoleftpad and megaleftpad - both could see widespread adoption, so you are transitively dependent on both.
I have no hope of this ever happening and am abandoning the web as a platform for interactive applications in my own projects. I’d rather build native applications using SDL3 or anything else.
It's perfectly possible to build web apps without relying on npm at all, or by being very selective and conservative about the packages you choose as your direct and transitive dependencies. If not by reviewing every line of code, then certainly by vendoring them.
Yes, this is more inconvenient and labor intensive, but the alternative is far riskier and worse for users.
The problem is with web developers themselves, who are often lazy, and prioritize their own development experience over their users'.
Apache Commons helper libraries don't import sub libraries for every little thing, they collect a large toolbox into a single library/jar.
Why instead do people in the javascript ecosystem insist on separating every function into it's own library that STILL has to import helper libraries? Why do they insist on making imports fractally complex for zero gain?
At this point, it’s just status-quo and lazyness
Not hating on the author but I doubt similar compromise would happen to Facebook or Google owned package.
People have done, but the ecosystem has already engrossed around the current status quo and it's very hard to get rid of habits.
At a time small JS libraries were desired, and good library marketing approach, but nowadays simple sites ship megabytes of without a care.
In particular this developer is symptomatic of the problem of the NPM ecosystem and I've used him multiple times as an example of what not to do.
It started as CommonJs ([1]) with Server-side JavaScript (SSJS) runtimes like Helma, v8cgi, etc. before node.js even existed but then was soon totally dominated by node.js. The history of Server-side JavaScript btw is even longer than Java on the server side, starting with Netscape's LifeScript in 1996 I believe. Apart from the module-loading spec, the CommonJs initiative also specified concrete modules such as the interfaces for node.js/express.js HTTP "middlewares" you can plug as routes and for things like auth handlers (JSGI itself was inspired by Ruby's easy REST DSL).
The reason for is-array, left-pad, etc. is that people wanted to write idiomatic code rather than use idiosyncratic JS typechecking code everywhere and use other's people packages as good citizens in a quid pro quo way.
[1]: https://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/CommonJS
Edit: the people crying for an "authority" to just impose a stdlib fail to understand that the JS ecosystem is a heterogeneous environment around a standardized language with multiple implementations; this concept seems lost on TypeScripters who need big daddy MS or other monopolist to sort it all out for them
It's not unique in this sense, yet others manage to provide a lot more in their stdlib.
It's not that you need a "big daddy". It's that the ecosystem needs a community that actually cares about shit like this vulnerability.
There are certainly a lot of libraries on crates.io, but I’ve noticed more projects in that ecosystem are willing to push back and resist importing unproven crates for smaller tasks. Most imported crates seem to me to be for bigger functionality that would be otherwise tedious to maintain, not something like “is this variable an array”.
(Note that I’m not saying Rust and Cargo are completely immune to the issue here)
I just created a Next.js app, saw that `is-arrayish` was in my node_modules, and tried to figure out how it got there and why. Here's the chain of dependencies:
next > sharp > color > color-string > simple-swizzle > is-arrayish
`next` uses `sharp` for image optimization. Seems reasonable.
`sharp` uses `color` (https://www.npmjs.com/package/color) to convert and manipulate color strings. Again, that seems reasonable. This package is maintained by Qix-.
Everything else in the chain (color-string > simple-swizzle > is-arrayish) is also maintained by Qix-. It's obnoxious to me that he feels it is necessary to have 80 different packages, but it would also be a substantial amount of effort for the other parties to stop relying on Qix-'s stuff entirely.
I'm not saying it is safer, just to the tired grug brain it can feel safer.
Why do "Java people" depend on lowrie's itext? Remember the leftpad-esque incident he initiated in 2015?
Most people writing JavaScript code for employment cannot really program. It is not a result of intellectual impairment, but appears to be more a training and cultural deficit in the work force. The result is extreme anxiety at the mere idea of writing original code, even when trivial in size and scope. The responses vary but often take the form of reused cliches of which some don't even directly apply.
What's weird about this is that it is mostly limited to the employed workforce. Developers who are self-taught or spend as much time writing personal code on side projects don't have this anxiety. This is weird because the resulting hobby projects tend to be substantially more durable than products funded by employment that are otherwise better tested by paid QA staff.
As a proof ask any JavaScript team at your employment to build their next project without a large framework and just observe how they respond both verbally and non-verbally.
"It has been tested by a 1000 people before me"
"What if there is an upstream optimisation?"
"I'm just here to focus on Business Problems™"
"It reduces cognitive load"
---
Whilst I think you are exaggerating, I do recognise this phenomenon. For me, it was during the pandemic when I had to train / support a lot of bootcamp grads and new entrants to the career. They were anxious to perform in their new career and interpreted that as shipping tickets as fast as possible.
These developers were not dumb but they had... like, no drive at all to engage with problems. Most programmers should enjoy problems, not develop a kind of bad feeling behind the eyes, or a tightness in their chest. But for these folks, a problem was a threat, of a bad status update at their daily Scrum.
Dependencies are a socially condoned shortcut to that. You can use a library and look like a sensible and pragmatic engineer. When everyone around you appears to accept this as the norm, it's too easy to just go with the flow.
I think it is a change in the psychological demographic too. This will sound fanciful. But tech used to select for very independent, stubborn, disagreeable people. Now, agreeableness is king. And what is more agreeable than using dependencies?
reinventing the wheel
some comparison to assembly
To be honest, I think these programmers understood their jobs perfectly here. Their bosses view programmers as commodities, are not concerned with robustness, maintainability, or technical merit - they want a crank they can turn that spits out features.
> As a proof ask any JavaScript team at your employment to build their next project without a large framework and just observe how they respond both verbally and non-verbally.
With an assumption like that, I bet the answer is mostly the same if you ask any Java/Python dev for example — build your next microservice/API without Spring or DRF/Flask.
Even though I only clock at about 5YOE, I'm really tired of hearing these terrible takes since I've met plentiful share of non-JS backend folks for example, who have no idea about basic API design, design patterns or even how to properly use the same framework they use for every single project.
A key phrase that comes up is "this is a solved problem." So what? You should want to solve it yourself, too. It's the PM's job to tell us not to.
The main reasons you don't see this in other languages is they don't have so many developers, and their packaging ecosystems are generally waaay higher friction. Rust is just as easy, but way higher skill level. Python is... not awful but it's definitely still a pain to publish packages for. C++, yeah why even bother.
If Python ever official adopts uv and we get a nice `uv publish` command then you will absolutely see the same thing there.
The rust docs, a static site generator, pull in over 700 packages.
Because it’s trivial and easy
Another one for “web3 is going great”…
Was caught quickly (hours? hard to be sure, the versions have been removed/overwritten).
Attacker owns npmjs.help domain.
Kinda "proud" on it haha :D
Not sure if that would be a better result in the end. It seems like it depends on who has direct dependencies and how much testing they do. Do they pass it on or not?
the actual code only runs in a browser context - it replaces all crypto addresses in many places with the attacker's.
a list of the attacker's wallet addresses: https://gist.github.com/sindresorhus/2b7466b1ec36376b8742dc7...
So let me raise a different concern. This looks like an exploit for web browsers, where an average user (and most above average users) have no clue as to what's running underneath. And cryptocurrency and web3 aren't the only sensitive information that browsers handle. Meaning that similar exploits could arise targeting any of those. With millions of developers, someone is bound to repeat the same mistake sooner or later. And with some packages downloaded thousands of times per day, some CI/CD system will pull it in and publish it in production. This is a bigger problem than just a developer's oversight.
- How do the end user protect themselves at this point? Especially the average user?
- How do you prevent supply chain compromises like this?
- What about other language registries?
- What about other platforms? (binaries, JVM, etc?)
This isn't a rhetorical question. Please discuss the solutions that you use or are aware of.
Unless this is a situation that could've been easily avoided with a password manager since the link was from a website not in your manager's database, so can't happen to anyone following security basics, and the point of discussing the oversight instead of just giving up is to increase the share of people who follow the basics?
Don't use unregulated financial products. The likelihood of a bank being hit by this isn't zero - but in most parts of the world they would be liable and the end user would be refunded.
> How do you prevent supply chain compromises like this?
Strictly audit your code.
There's no magic answer here. Oh, I'm sure you can throw an LLM at the problem and hope that the number of false positives and false negatives don't drown you. But it comes down to having an engineering culture which moves slowly and doesn't break things.
Why a package with 10+ million weekly downloads can just be "updated" like this is beyond me. Have a waiting period. Make sure you have to be explicit. Use dates. Some of the packages hadn't been updated in 7 years and then we firehosed thousands of CI/CD jobs with them within minutes?
npm and most of these package manager should be getting some basic security measures like waiting periods. it would be nice if I could turn semver off to be honest and force folks to actually publish new packages. I'm always bummed when a 4 layer deep dependency just updates at 10PM EST because that's when the open source guy had time.
Packages used to break all the time, but I guess things kind of quieted down and people stopped using semvers as much. Like I think major packages like React don't generally have "somedepend" : "^1.0.0" but go with "1.0.0"
I think npm and the community knew this day was coming and just hopes it'll be fixed by tooling, but we need fundamental change in how packages are updated and verified. The idea that we need to "quickly" rollout a security fix with a minor patch is a good idea in theory, but in practice that doesn't really happen all that often. My audit returns all kinds of minor issues, but its rare that I need it...and if that's the case I'll probably do a direct update of my packages.
Package-lock.json was a nice bandaid, but it shouldn't have been the final solution IMHO. We need to reduce semver usage, have some concept of package age/importance, and npm needs a scanner that can detect obviously obfuscated code like this and at least put the package in quarantine. We could also use some hooks in npm so that developers could write easy to control scripts to not install newer packages etc.
Yep. Also interesting how many automated security scanners picked this up right away ... but NPM itself can't be bothered, their attitude is "YOLO we'll publish anything"
You could imagine that a compromised pad-left package could read the contents of all password inputs on the page and send it to an attacker server, but if you don't let that package access the document, or send web requests, you can avoid this compromise.
- Install as little software as possible, use websites if possible.
- Keep important stuff (especially cryptocurrency) on a separate device.
- If you are working on a project that pulls 100s of dependencies from a package registry, put that project on a VM or container.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/martypitt/0d50c350aa7f0fc73354754343...
grep -r "_0x112fa8"
"overrides": {
"chalk": "5.3.0",
"strip-ansi": "7.1.0",
"color-convert": "2.0.1",
"color-name": "1.1.4",
"is-core-module": "2.13.1",
"error-ex": "1.3.2",
"has-ansi": "5.0.1"
}
[0] https://jdstaerk.substack.com/i/173095305/how-to-protect-you...
[1] https://github.com/chalk/chalk/issues/656#issuecomment-32676...
Edit: As of this morning, `npm audit` will catch this.
It actually calculates the Levenshtein distance between the legitimate address and every address in its own list. It then selects the attacker's address that is visually most similar to the original one.
This is a brilliant piece of social engineering baked right into the code. It's designed to specifically defeat the common security habit of only checking the first and last few characters of an address before confirming a transaction.
We did a full deobfuscation of the payload and analyzed this specific function. Wrote up the details here for anyone interested: https://jdstaerk.substack.com/p/we-just-found-malicious-code...
Stay safe!
I don't agree that the exuberance over the brilliance of this attack is warranted if you give this a moment's thought. The web has been fighting lookalike attacks for decades. This is just a more dynamic version of the same.
To be honest, this whole post has the ring of AI writing, not careful analysis.
No it doesn't?
It has been what, hours? since the discovery? Are you expecting them to spend time analysing it instead of announcing it?
Also, nearly everyone has AI editing content these days. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t written by a human.
> Our package-lock.json specified the stable version 1.3.2 or newer, so it installed the latest version 1.3.3
As far as I've always understood, the lockfile always specifies one single, locked version for each dependency, and even provides the URL to the tarball of that version. You can define "x version or newer" in the package.json file, but if it updates to a new patch version it's updating the lockfile with it. The npm docs suggest this is the case as well: https://arc.net/l/quote/cdigautx
And with that, packages usually shouldn't be getting updated in your CI pipeline.
Am I mistaken on how npm(/yarn/pnpm) lockfiles work?
In my experience, it's common for CI pipelines to be misconfigured in this way, and for Node developers to misunderstand what the lock file is for.
Thank you!
The package.json locked the file to ^1.3.2. If a newer version exists online that still satisfies the range in package.json (like 1.3.3 for ^1.3.2), npm install will often fetch that newer version and update your package-lock.json file automatically.
That’s how I understand it / that’s my current knowledge. Maybe there is someone here who can confirm/deny that. That would be great!
The npm team eventually seemed to settle on requiring someone to bring an RFC for this improvment, and the RFC someone did create I think has sat neglected in a corner ever since.
I am sorry, but this is not due to not having a good standard library, this is just bad programming. Just pure laziness. At this point just blacklist every package starting with is-.
On one extreme, we have standards committees that move glacially, and on the other, we have a chaotic package ecosystem moving faster than is prudent. The two are related.
Kudos to you for owning up to it.
As others have said, it's the kind of thing that could happen to anyone, unfortunately.
Got it from the "simple-swizzle" package that hasn't been taken down by NPM.
That page says that the affected versions are ">=0". Does that seem right? That page also says:
> Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.
Is this information accurate?
Edit: However, I think the reason the security advisory marks the entire package at the moment, is because there is no mechanism in npm to notify users a version with an exploit is currently installed. `npm audit` looks at the versions configured, not installed.
The security advisory triggering this warning forces everyone to reinstall packages today, in case 4.4.2 was installed.
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-hfm8-9jrf-7g9w
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-5g7q-qh7p-jjvm
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-8mgj-vmr8-frr6
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-m99c-cfww-cxqx
I wonder if they're all from the same thing, they all popped up at the same time.
edit: they do appear to all be the same thing, and the advisory version wildcard is wrong: https://github.com/github/advisory-database/issues/6099
Now? Why aren't everyone setting up own GitHub mirrors is beyond me, almost. They were 100% right.
Once upon a time, I used a software called passwordmaker. Essentially, it computed a password like hash(domain+username+master password). Genius idea, but it was a nightmare to use. Why? Because amazon.se and amazon.com share the same username/password database. Similarly, the "domain" for Amazon's app was "com.amazon.something".
Perhaps it's time for browser vendors to strongly bind credentials to the domain, the whole domain and nothing but the domain, so help me Codd.
Although I'll still be told that using single-header libraries and avoiding the C standard library are regressive and obsolete, so gotta wait 10 more years I guess.
That sounds great in theory. In practice, NPM is very, very buggy, and some of those bugs impact pulling deps from git repos. See my issue here: https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/8440
Here's the history behind that:
Projects with build steps were silently broken as late as 2020: https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/1865
Somehow no one thought to test this until 2020, and the entire NPM user base either didn't use the feature, or couldn't be arsed to raise the issue until 2020.
The problem gets kinda sorta fixed in late 2020: https://github.com/npm/pacote/issues/53
I say kinda sorta fixed, because somehow they only fixed (part of) the problem when installing package from git non-globally -- `npm install -g whatever` is still completely broken. Again, somehow no one thought to test this, I guess. The issue I opened, which I mentioned at the very beginning of this comment, addresses this bug.
Now, I say "part of of the problem" was fixed because the npm docs blatantly lie to you about how prepack scripts work, which requires a workaround (which, again, only helps when not installing globally -- that's still completely broken); from https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v8/using-npm/scripts:
prepack
- Runs BEFORE a tarball is packed (on "npm pack", "npm publish", and when installing a git dependencies).
Speaking of TypeScript, the TypeScript compiler developers ran into this very problem, and have adopted this workaround, which is to invoke a script from the npm prepare script, which in turn does some janky checks to guess if the execution is occuring from a source tree fetched from git, and if so, then it explicitly invokes the prepack script, which then kicks off compiler and such. This is the workaround they use today:
https://github.com/cspotcode/workaround-broken-npm-prepack-b...
... and while I'm mentioning bugs, even that has a nasty bug: https://github.com/cspotcode/workaround-broken-npm-prepack-b...
Yes, if the workaround calls `npm run prepack` and the prepack script fails for some reason (e.g. a compiler error), the exit code is not propagated, so `npm install` will silently install the respective git dependency in a broken state.
How no one looks at this and comes to the conclusion that NPM is in need of better stewardship, or ought to be entirely supplanted by a competing package manager, I dunno.
So I guess a lot more accounts/packages might be affected than the ones stated in the article
If you're doing financial transactions using a big pile of NPM dependencies, you should IMHO be financially liable for this kind of thing when your users get scammed.
Why in the world would they NEED to stop? It apparently doesn't harm their "business"
What kind of crazy AI could possible have noticed that on the NPM side?
This is frustrating as someone that has built/published apps and extensions to other software providers for years and must wait days or weeks for a release to be approved while it's scanned and analyzed.
For all the security wares that MS and GitHub sell, NPM has seen practically no investment over the years (e.g. just go review the NPM security page... oh, wait, where?).
is there a runnable command to determine if the package list has a compromised version of anything?
[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-manual/de...
Understatement of the year. When a project/ecosystem is more interested in putting virtue signaling trolls like Ashley "Kill all men" Williams in leadership positions versus actual technologists, it shows.
So if we're discussing anything here, why not what this reason is, instead of everyone praising their favourite package registry?
https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/4016#issuecomment-76316744
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645969
https://github.com/npm/cli/commit/5a3b345d6d5d175ea9ec967364...
I guess having some cool down period after some strange profile activity (e.g. you've suddenly logged from China instead of Germany) before you're allowed to add another signing key would help, but other than that?
Is there a way to not accept any package version less than X months old? It's not ideal because malicious changes may still have gone undetected in that time span.
Time to deploy AI to automatically inspect packages for suspect changes.
The GitHub page (https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-hfm8-9jrf-7g9w) says to treat the computer as compromised. What does this mean? Do I have to do a full reset to be sure? Should I avoid running the app until the version is updated?
- Don't update dependencies unless necessary
- Don't use `npm` to install NPM packages, use Deno with appropriate sandboxing flags
- Sign up for https://socket.dev and/or https://www.aikido.dev
- Work inside a VM
Again, this is not the failure of a single person. This is a failure of the software industry. Supply chain attacks have gigantic impacts. Yet these are all solved problems. Somebody has to just implement the standard security measures that prevents these compromises. We're software developers... we're the ones to implement them.
Every software packaging platform on the planet should already require code signing, artifact signing, user account attacker access detection heuristics, 2FA, etc. If they don't, it's not because they can't, it's because nobody has forced them to.
These attacks will not stop. With AI (and continuous proof that they work) they will now get worse. Mandate software building codes now.
Return-Path: <ndr-6be2b1e0-8c4b-11f0-0040-f184d6629049@mt86.npmjs.help> X-Original-To: martin@minimum.se Delivered-To: martin@minimum.se Received: from mail-storage-03.fbg1.glesys.net (unknown [10.1.8.3]) by mail-storage-04.fbg1.glesys.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 596B855C0082 for <martin@minimum.se>; Mon, 8 Sep 2025 06:47:25 +0200 (CEST) Received: from mail-halon-02.fbg1.glesys.net (37-152-59-100.static.glesys.net [37.152.59.100]) by mail-storage-03.fbg1.glesys.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 493F2209A568 for <martin@minimum.se>; Mon, 8 Sep 2025 06:47:25 +0200 (CEST) X-SA-Rules: DATE_IN_PAST_03_06,DKIM_SIGNED,DKIM_VALID,DKIM_VALID_AU,FROM_FMBLA_NEWDOM,HTML_FONT_LOW_CONTRAST,HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_HTML_ONLY,SPF_HELO_NONE,SPF_PASS X-RPD-Score: 0 X-SA-Score: 1.1 X-Halon-ID: e9093e1f-8c6e-11f0-b535-1932b48ae8a8 Received: from smtp-83-4.mailtrap.live (smtp-83-4.mailtrap.live [45.158.83.4]) by mail-halon-02.fbg1.glesys.net (Halon) with ESMTPS id e9093e1f-8c6e-11f0-b535-1932b48ae8a8; Mon, 08 Sep 2025 06:47:23 +0200 (CEST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; x=1757637200; d=smtp.mailtrap.live; s=rwmt1; h=content-transfer-encoding:content-type:from:to:subject:date:mime-version: message-id:feedback-id:cfbl-address:from; bh=46LbKElKI+JjrZc6EccpLxY7G+BazRijag+UbPv0J3Y=; b=Dc1BbAc9maHeyNKed/X7iAPabcuvlgAUP6xm5te6kkvGIJlame8Ti+ErH8yhFuRy/xhvQTSj8ETtV f3AElmzHDWcU3HoD/oiagTH9JbacmElSvwtCylHLriVeYbgwhZVzTm4rY7hw/TVqNE5xIZqWWCMrVG wi+k9uY+FUIQAh7Ta2WiPk/A4TPh04h3PzA50zathvYcIsPC0iSf7BBE+IIjdLXzDzNZwRmjgv2ZHW GAx/FRCPFgg0PbVvhJw98vSHnKmjPO/mmcotKFG+MUWkCtTu28Mm46t7MI7z5PrdCXZDA7L1nVnIwE ffIf0zED32Z6tFSJFNmYgFZlD6g+DnQ== DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; x=1757637200; d=npmjs.help; s=rwmt1; h=content-transfer-encoding:content-type:from:to:subject:date:mime-version: message-id:feedback-id:cfbl-address:from; bh=46LbKElKI+JjrZc6EccpLxY7G+BazRijag+UbPv0J3Y=; b=DyWvxSOjMf7WfCVtmch+zw63kZ/OOBjcWnh1kIYs/hozgemb9mBIQCMqAdb4vSZChoW5uReVH5+k5 Jaz7UodbPJksVkYWqJOVg6nyx5EaYMYdgcw1+BCct/Sf2ceFwWurhupa6y3FBTFWBYLhcsAXERlx2l IuxWlpZoMDEBqDxjs8yvx/rkBrcd/2SNTcI+ooKJkrBIGBKuELOd3A5C6jlup6JNA4bE7vzP3FUfKw y0357UMnn45zWHm9HvudO4269FRlNjpiJaW7XF1/ANVrnDlNWfUGNQ5yxLZqmQDTtxFI7HcOrF3bTQ O/nrmVOvN9ywMvk/cJU4qGHqD9lT32A== CFBL-Address: fbl@smtp.mailtrap.live; report=arf X-Report-Abuse-To: abuse@mailtrap.io Received: from npmjs.help by smtp.mailtrap.live with ESMTPSA 6aee9fff-8c4b-11f0-87bb-0e939677d2a1; Mon, Sep 08 2025 00:33:20 GMT Feedback-ID: ss:770486:transactional:mailtrap.io Message-ID: <6be2b1e0-8c4b-11f0-0040-f184d6629049@npmjs.help> X-Mt-Data: bAX0GlwcNW6Dl_Qnkf3OnU.GLCSjw_4H01v67cuDIh2Jkf52mzsVFT_ZEVEe0W6Lf3qzW2LP_TCy93I46MCsoT0pB9HozQkvCw22ORSCt3JBma1G3v9aDEypT1DLmyqlb6hYLF3H7tJCgcxTU5pbijyNaOFtoUMdiTA6jxaONeZbBj.SKUa5CLT5TMpeNHG6oGIiY_jqlU.nQkxGPY3v9E34.Nz4ga8p9Pd_BplftaE~--2CLrluJMY65S5xFl--IISg0olYJu6DVyVDEcJ.AQ~~ MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:33:20 +0000 Subject: Two-Factor Authentication Update Required To: "molsson" <martin@minimum.se> From: "npm" <support@npmjs.help> Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
All these Chrome, VSCode, Discord, Electron-apps, browser extensions, etc – they all update ± every week, and I can't even tell what features are being added. For comparison, Sublime updates once a YEAR and I'm totally fine with that.
junon•4h ago
More info:
- https://github.com/chalk/chalk/issues/656
- https://github.com/debug-js/debug/issues/1005#issuecomment-3...
Affected packages (at least the ones I know of):
- ansi-styles@6.2.2
- debug@4.4.2 (appears to have been yanked as of 8 Sep 18:09 CEST)
- chalk@5.6.1
- supports-color@10.2.1
- strip-ansi@7.1.1
- ansi-regex@6.2.1
- wrap-ansi@9.0.1
- color-convert@3.1.1
- color-name@2.0.1
- is-arrayish@0.3.3
- slice-ansi@7.1.1
- color@5.0.1
- color-string@2.1.1
- simple-swizzle@0.2.3
- supports-hyperlinks@4.1.1
- has-ansi@6.0.1
- chalk-template@1.1.1
- backslash@0.2.1
It looks and feels a bit like a targeted attack.
Will try to keep this comment updated as long as I can before the edit expires.
---
Chalk has been published over. The others remain compromised (8 Sep 17:50 CEST).
NPM has yet to get back to me. My NPM account is entirely unreachable; forgot password system does not work. I have no recourse right now but to wait.
Email came from support at npmjs dot help.
Looked legitimate at first glance. Not making excuses, just had a long week and a panicky morning and was just trying to knock something off my list of to-dos. Made the mistake of clicking the link instead of going directly to the site like I normally would (since I was mobile).
Just NPM is affected. Updates to be posted to the `/debug-js` link above.
Again, I'm so sorry.
jap•3h ago
dboreham•3h ago
junon•3h ago
Don't do security things when you're not fully awake, too. Lesson learned.
The email was a "2FA update" email telling me it's been 12 months since I updated 2FA. That should have been a red flag but I've seen similarly dumb things coming from well-intentioned sites before. Since npm has historically been in contact about new security enhancements, this didn't smell particularly unbelievable to my nose.
The email went to the npm-specific inbox, which is another way I can verify them. That address can be queried publicly but I don't generally count on spammers to find that one but instead look at git addresses etc
The domain name was `npmjs dot help` which obviously should have caught my eye, and would have if I was a bit more awake.
The actual in-email link matched what I'd expect on npm's actual site, too.
I'm still trying to work out exactly how they got access. They didn't technically get a real 2FA code from the actual, I don't believe. EDIT: Yeah they did, nevermind. Was a TOTP proxy attack, or whatever you'd call it.
Will post a post-mortem when everything is said and done.
dboreham•3h ago
junon•3h ago
sugarpimpdorsey•3h ago
goku12•3h ago
quotemstr•2h ago
tpxl•2h ago
goku12•1h ago
mschuster91•1h ago
goku12•1h ago
That's exactly what I mean! Who would use it if the UI/UX is terrible? Many Gemini (protocol) browsers like Lagrange have such pleasant UIs for it, though somewhat minimal. With sufficient push, you could have used mutual TLS from even hardware tokens.
chuckadams•19m ago
xorcist•10m ago
It's nothing short of amazing that nobody worked on this. It's not as if there isn't a need. Everyone with high security requirements (defense, banks etc.) already do this, but this clumsy plugins and (semi-)proprietary software. Instead we get the nth iteration of settings redesigns.
dboreham•2h ago
ksdnjweusdnkl21•2h ago
Scoundreller•1h ago
Once heard of a user putting in a helpdesk ticket asking why they had to pay for the TOTP app. Then I realize their TOTP seed is probably out in the open now.
I’m sure we can imagine how else this could go badly…
sugarpimpdorsey•3h ago
It's a good thing the WebPKI cartel mostly did away with EV certs.... these days any old cert where only the SAN matches the domain and your browser gives a warm fuzzy "you're secure!"
mananaysiempre•2h ago
By contrast, OV certs, which were originally supposed a very similar level of assurance, were did away with by CAs themselves, by cost-optimizing the verification requirements into virtual nonexistence.
That said, it remains a perpetual struggle to get people to understand the difference between being connected to the legitimate operator of satan.example (something an Internet-wide system mostly can guarantee) and it being wise to transact there (something extensive experience shows it can’t and shouldn’t try to). And if you’re a domain owner, your domain is your identity; pick one and stick to it. Stackoverflow.blog is stupid, don’t be like stackoverflow.blog.
[1] https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-ar...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/nope-...
sugarpimpdorsey•1h ago
That's because the browser implementers gave up on trying to solve the identity problem. It's too difficult they said, we'd rather push other things.
Google implemented certificate pinning in Chrome for themselves and a few friends, said fuck everyone else, and declared the problem solved. Who cares about everyone else when your own properties are protected and you control the browser?
Meanwhile the average user has no idea what a certificate does, whether it does or doesn't prove identity.
No wonder they removed the lock icon from the browser.
Kwpolska•2h ago
jvuygbbkuurx•3h ago
junon•3h ago
They even gave me a new TOTP code to install (lol) and it worked. Showed up in authy fine. Whoever made this put a ton of effort into it.
scratchyone•1h ago
I've always wondered if I ever get phished if I'll notice bc of that or if I'll just go "ugh 1password isn't working, guess i'll paste my password in manually" and end up pwned
junon•48m ago
The `.help` should have been the biggest red flag, followed by the 48-hours request timeline. I wasn't thinking about things like I normally would this morning and just wanted to get things done today. Been a particularly stressful week, not that it's any excuse.
tadamcz•2h ago
If you maintain popular open source packages for the love of God get yourself a couple of security keys.
diggan•2h ago
Can't really tell you what not to do, but if you're not already using a password manager so you can easily avoid phishing scams, I really recommend you to look into starting doing so.
In the case of this attack, if you had a password manager and ended up on a domain that looks like the real one, but isn't, you'd notice something is amiss when your password manager cannot find any existing passwords for the current website, and then you'd take a really close look at the domain to confirm before moving forward.
withinboredom•2h ago
That being said, if you’re making login pages: please, for the love of god, test them with multiple password managers. Oh, and make sure they also work correctly with the browser’s autotranslation. Don’t rely on the label to make form submission decisions ... please.
diggan•2h ago
I'd probably go looking for a new password manager if it fails to do one of the basic features they exist for, copy-pasting passwords defeats a lot of the purpose :)
> That being said, if you’re making login pages
I think we're doomed on this front already. My previous bank still (in 2025!) only allows 6 numbers as the online portal login password, no letters or special characters allowed, and you cannot paste in the field so no password manager works with their login fields, the future is great :)
withinboredom•2h ago
This isn’t the fault of the password managers themselves, but devs not putting the right metadata on their login forms, or havo the password field show only after putting in the email address, causing the password input to fail to be filled, etc.
aaronharnly•1h ago
ziml77•1h ago
nodesocket•3h ago
junon•3h ago
Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/q8s235k
SSLy•3h ago
junon•3h ago
SSLy•2h ago
XxgodReixX88•1h ago
alexellisuk•2h ago
I'm just curious - and as a word of warning to others so we can learn. I may be missing some details, I've read most of the comments on the page.
junon•2h ago
alexellisuk•2h ago
osa1•1h ago
For example, GitHub asks for 2FA when I change certain repo settings (or when deleting a repo etc.) even when I'm logged in. Maybe NPM needs to do the same?
koil•1h ago
hughw•30m ago
Mogzol•18m ago
dboreham•1h ago
FWIW npmjs does support FIDO2 including hard tokens like Yubikey.
They do not force re-auth when issuing an access token with publish rights, which is probably how the attackers compromised the packages. iirc GitHub does force re-auth when you request an access token.
nodesocket•3h ago
hunter2_•3h ago
mrguyorama•49m ago
My local credit union sent me a "please change your password" email from a completely unassociated email address with a link to the change password portal. I emailed them saying "Hey it looks like someone is phishing" and they said, "nope, we really, intentionally, did this"
Companies intentionally withhold warning emails as late as possible to cause more people to incur late fees. So everyone is used to "shit, gotta do this now or get screwed"
You can't hope to have good security when everyone's money is controlled by organizations that actively train people to have bad OPSEC or risk missing rent.
hunter2_•34m ago
I used the word "often" rather than "always" for this reason.
FergusArgyll•3h ago
0x10ed43c718714eb63d5aa57b78b54704e256024e
0x13f4ea83d0bd40e75c8222255bc855a974568dd4
0x1111111254eeb25477b68fb85ed929f73a960582
0xd9e1ce17f2641f24ae83637ab66a2cca9c378b9f
Source: https://github.com/chalk/chalk/issues/656#issuecomment-32670...
dbdr•26m ago
> Those are swap contract addresses, not attacker addresses. E.g. 0x66a9893cC07D91D95644AEDD05D03f95e1dBA8Af the Uniswap v4 universal router addr.
> Every indication so far is that the attacker stole $0 from all of this. Which is a best-case outcome.
FergusArgyll•23m ago
mcintyre1994•2h ago
bflesch•3h ago
twoodfin•3h ago
anonymars•2h ago
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-FAQ/#q-b05
NooneAtAll3•54m ago
that message feels like it could work as a first-time as well
twoodfin•15m ago
Regardless of whether the real NPM had done this in the past, decades of dumb password expiration policies have trained us that requests like this are to be expected rather than suspected.
lifeinthevoid•3h ago
junon•3h ago
markasoftware•3h ago
rollcat•3h ago
Urgency is poison.
Please, please put a foot in the door whenever you see anyone trying to push this kind of sh*t on your users. Make one month's advance notice the golden standard.
I see this pattern in scam mail (including physical) all the time: stamp an unreasonably short notice and expect the mark to panic. This scam works - and this is why legit companies that try this "in good faith" should be shamed for doing it.
Actual alerts: just notify. Take immediate, preventive, but non-destructive action, and help the user figure out how to right it - on their own terms.
notmyjob•2h ago
niwtsol•2h ago
notmyjob•1h ago
naikrovek•26m ago
and use what? instant message? few things lack legitimacy more than an instant message asking you to do something.
Links in email are much more of a problem than email itself. So tempting to click. It's right there, you don't have to dig through bookmarks, you don't have to remember anything, just click. A link is seductive.
the actual solution is to avoid dependencies whenever possible, so that you can review them when they change. You depend on them. You ARE reviewing them, right? Fewer things to depend on is better than more, and NPM is very much an ecosystem where one is encouraged to depend on others as much as possible.
IshKebab•2h ago
junon•2h ago
kidk•3h ago
BlackjackCF•3h ago
winwang•3h ago
internetter•40m ago
tripplyons•10m ago
(Microsoft owns GitHub, which owns NPM.)
joaomoreno•2h ago
You can run the following to check if you have the malware in your dependency tree:
`rg -u --max-columns=80 _0x112fa8`
Requires ripgrep:
`brew install rg`
https://github.com/chalk/chalk/issues/656#issuecomment-32668...
koolba•2h ago
tripplyons•7m ago
npm cache clean --force pnpm cache delete
cgijoe•2h ago
skrebbel•2h ago
EasyMark•2h ago
The command rg -u --max-columns=80 _0x112fa8 uses the rg (ripgrep) utility. Here's a breakdown of what each part does:
naikrovek•28m ago
timsh•1h ago
nosefurhairdo•1h ago
If you have crypto wallets on the potentially compromised machine, or intend to transfer crypto via some web client, proceed with caution.
aerodynamic_•1h ago
https://gist.github.com/edgarpavlovsky/695b896445c19b6f66f14...
yifanl•1h ago
hunter2_•20m ago
tripplyons•6m ago
zachrip•2h ago
junon•2h ago
zachrip•1h ago
zachleat•2h ago
junon•2h ago
If there's any ideas on what I should be doing, I'm all ears.
EDIT: I've heard back, they said they're aware and are on it, but no further details.
quotemstr•2h ago
And because it could happen to anyone that we should be doing a better job using AI models for defense. If ordinary people reading a link target URL can see it as suspicious, a model probably can too. We should be plumbing all our emails through privacy-preserving models to detect things like this. The old family of vulnerability scanners isn't working.
jacquesm•2h ago
Great of you to own up to it.
mfedderly•2h ago
I actually got hit by something that sounds very similar back in July. I was saved by my DNS settings where "npNjs dot com" wound up on a blocklist. I might be paranoid, but it felt targeted and was of a higher level of believability than I'd seen before.
I also more recently received another email asking for an academic interview about "understanding why popular packages wouldn't have been published in a while" that felt like elicitation or an attempt to get publishing access.
Sadly both of the original emails are now deleted so I don't have the exact details anymore, but stay safe out there everyone.
pryelluw•2h ago
Please take care and see this as things that happen and not your own personal failure.
hackerindio•2h ago
joshmanders•1h ago
HelloWorldH•1h ago
komali2•1h ago
tomkarho•1h ago
33a•1h ago
https://socket.dev/blog/npm-author-qix-compromised-in-major-...
While it sucks that this happened, the good thing is that the ecosystem mobilized quickly. I think these sorts of incidents really show why package scanning is essential for securing open source package repositories.
winterqt•51m ago
> The author appears to have deleted most of the compromised package before losing access to his account. At the time of writing, the package simple-swizzle is still compromised.
Is this quote from TFA incorrect, since npm hasn’t yanked anything yet?
junon•21m ago
npm does appear to have yanked a few, slowly, but I still don't have any insight as to what they're doing exactly.
naikrovek•50m ago
phishing is too easy. so easy that I don't think the completely unchecked growth of ecosystems like NPM can continue. metastasis is not healthy. there are too many maintainers writing too many packages that too many others rely on.
sim7c00•50m ago
want to stress everyone it can happen to. no one has perfect opsec or tradecraft as a 1 man show. its simply not possible. only luck gets one through and that often enough runs out.
rootlocus•28m ago
Does anyone know how this attack works? Is it a CSRF against npmjs.com?
smeijer87•23m ago
junon•23m ago
It wasn't a single-click attack, sorry for the confusion. I logged into their fake site with a TOTP code.
Cthulhu_•14m ago