Pebcak.

I write this as someone who fully hates npm and javascript, but it's not even a package manager issue. The issue is that someone gets hacked and their credentials get stolen. This could happen to any ecosystem, it's just more likely to be beneficial if you target JS because of ubiquity.

People would need to develop entirely new credential management protocols to circumvent this and they'd probably be risky to automate to the same degree of convenience that we have now so, unless you're looking to spin up containers for each and every step of development or, god forbid, write/vendor your dependencies it's actually not easy at all to prevent this sort of thing.

Interestingly, developers in ecosystems like Go, Rust, and those utilizing native Web APIs—where robust standard libraries drastically reduce reliance on third-party code and strict cryptographic verification is built into the core toolchain—reported zero instances of a college dropout’s weekend project wiping out global logistics infrastructure today.

As someone who's built a career in Rust, it is 100% susceptible to an attack like this. The community is just generally paranoid enough to avoid depending on super niche packages.

Even so, Cargo still doesn't have code signing and crates.io doesn't have 2FA. They just barely rolled out email alerts for new crates being published with your API key.

And there's dozens of single-author crates that are depended upon by millions of lines of code, any one of which could easily be a vector in a supply chain attack. In fact there have been attempted supply chain attacks against crates.io, but to my knowledge they've all relied on typo-squatting.

We're definitely overdue for a major attack.

I can tell without clicking that it's Snaps

Too lazy to check, but did they parody the entire Onion article or just the headline? Lol

AI image in header. Didn't read.