Examine dependencies and installation scripts. Very recently published, net-new packages, or scripts or dependencies that make network connections during installation should receive extra scrutiny.
I’m a little surprised npm doesn’t already do this and give you a big blinking warning in the install process about it.
There goes the argument of non technical users falling for scams. The tables have turned!
I do wonder if this would be negated by containered applications
[DO NOT DEVELOP MY APP]
Would you like to develop an app?
The really scary thing is probably the malicious npm dependencies. If I think about the projects at work with and all the different packages and the hundreds of dependencies no one knows. And it’s probably even worse in really big companies like Microsoft or Facebook, they probably got thousands across their products. I hope for us all that they scan them very regularly.
This is why my work will only use enterprise supported distros like RHEL. We don’t have the manpower to stay on top of every single package update to ensure they’re absolutely safe.
What does RHEL have to do about NPM package dependencies in software projects? A server or a developer’s desktop machine using RHEL would still be pulling the same packages from NPM as another other distro…unless I’m missing something?
You’re right, I’m a dumb dumb and misread the whole thing as RPM, whoops!
No worries! I thought maybe RHEL had like their own NPM repo or something (I think NixOS has python packages, so that kind of thing isn’t unheard of), but then that didn’t really make sense so I wanted to make sure I was understanding.
