On March 15, 2022, users of the popular Vue.js frontend JavaScript framework started experiencing what can only be described as a supply chain attack impacting the npm ecosystem. This was the result of the nested dependencies node-ipc and peacenotwar being sabotaged as an act of protest by the maintainer of the node-ipc package.
We’ve seen a massive increase in the number of open source packages created and used in the wild during the past few years. These days every ecosystem has its package manager, and almost every package manager has its hidden gems and configurations. That said, as developers continuously install an ever-expanding number of packages, attackers gain interest in the packages’ attack surfaces. Then, the journey to craft the perfectly hidden malicious package begins.
The JFrog Security research team continuously monitors popular open source software (OSS) repositories with our automated tooling to avert potential software supply chain security threats, and reports any vulnerabilities or malicious packages discovered to repository maintainers and the wider community. Most recently we disclosed 25 malicious packages in the npm repository that were picked up by our automated scanning tools.
In 2021, the WhiteSource Diffend automated malware detection platform detected and reported more than 1,200 malicious npm packages that were responsible for stealing credentials and crypto, as well as for running botnets and collecting host information from machines on which they were installed.
Modern software projects are mostly composed of open source code. The question of who really controls this code, and is responsible for detecting and fixing software supply chain security issues, became a significant source of concern after the discovery of the Log4Shell vulnerability.
On January 8, 2022, the open source maintainer of the wildly popular npm package colors, published colors@1.4.1 and colors@1.4.44-liberty-2 in which they intentionally introduced an offending commit that adds an infinite loop to the source code. The infinite loop is triggered and executed immediately upon initialization of the package’s source code, and would result in a Denial of Service (DoS) to any Node.js server using it.
As developers, we spend a lot of time in our IDEs writing new code, refactoring code, adding tests, fixing bugs and more. And in recent years, IDEs have become powerful tools, helping us developers with anything from interacting with HTTP requests to generally boosting our productivity. So you have to ask — what if we could also prevent security issues in our code before we ship it?
If you’re doing open source development today, chances are high that you’re active within the GitHub community — participating in open source projects and their repositories. A recent addition to the GitHub ecosystem is GitHub Packages, which was announced back in 2019 and is now receiving even more updates with the general availability of the GitHub Packages container registry.
As announced last week by our good friends at the Node.js Foundation, Snyk has agreed to take over from the amazing Node.js ecosystem vulnerability disclosure program. As a company that’s been part of this program from a very early stage — and has been inspired by it to create our own multi-ecosystem disclosure program — it is a great honor to have been entrusted with this responsibility, and we thank the Node.js Foundation sincerely for their trust in this matter.
