Technology is always changing and your processes and practices need to keep up with those changes. So while npm is 12 years old, your practices around npm package creation should hopefully be a lot more modern. If you have a feeling they may be a little out of date, though, keep reading.

Recently, there have been some remote code execution (RCE) attacks that included just a single line of well-built code that can run a remote shell. Let’s take a look at why and how these attacks work, why npm is particularly susceptible, what could happen if they get into machines, and how to detect and fix them.

Mend Supply Chain Defender reported and blocked dozens of packages from the same author. These packages targeted developers of many companies and frameworks like slack, Cloudflare, Datadog, Metamask, react, Shopify, OpenSea, Angular and more. A dependency confusion attack takes advantage of a software developer’s tendency to pull malicious code from public repositories rather than internal ones.

Two packages of well-known origin were found exfiltrating Windows SAM and SYSTEM files, apparently as part of internal security research rather than a targeted dependency confusion attack. On June 6th, 2022, the Mend research team used Supply Chain Defender to detect and flag two malicious packages from the same author that contained identical code. We alerted npm and the packages were removed within three hours of publication.

Great things happen when the academic world and the software industry work together! Today, we’d like to share a story about our recent collaboration with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, a big science institution in Germany. Back in January, Cris Staicu Ph.D. (Tenure-Track Faculty, CISPA), contacted us about his research on NodeJS and JavaScript.

When relying on a 3rd-party package from a non-commercial entity, there is always the risk of lack of support, especially when it comes to outdated packages and versions. If the package stops being maintained, nobody will implement a new feature we might need or fix a newly-discovered security vulnerability. Consider, for example, CVE-2019-17571. A critical remote code vulnerability which was never fixed in Log4j 1.x, since it was not supported anymore, and only fixed in Log4j 2.x.

All developers are prone to mistakes that leave them open to typosquatting attacks. Tiredness, dirty keyboard, or software issues may lead to typing some letters twice. Everyone would like to see a red screen and alarm coming out of the computer in such a case, but sadly, it doesn’t always work that way with most supply chain attacks.