It's easy to do both at project level and globally, and these days there are quite few legit packages that don't work without them. For those that don't, you can create a separate installation script to your project that cds into that folder and runs their install-script.
I know this isn't a silver bullet solution to supply chain attakcs, but, so far it has been effective against many attacks through npm.
I also use bubblewrap to isolate npm/pnpm/yarn (and everything started by them) from the rest of the system. Let's say all your source code resides in ~/code; put this somewhere in the beginning of your $PATH and name it `npm`; create symlinks/hardlinks to it for other package managers:
Notably `--share-net` should be moved down since it is negated by `--unshare-all`. I also added a reminder that the command is being bubblewrapped, modified the second read-write bind to the current directory, and changed the final exec to use `/usr/bin/env` to find the binary so it can be more flexible. I tested it with npm and yarn just now and it seems to work well. Thanks!
Why the same advice doesn't apply to `setup.py` or `build.rs`? Is it because npm is (ab)used for software distribution (eg. see sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041292) instead of being used only for managing library-dependencies?
It should apply for anything. Truth be told the process of learning programming is so arduous at times that you basically just copy and paste and run fucking anything in terminal to get a project setup or fixed.
Go down the rabbit hole of just installing LLM software and you’ll find yourself in quite a copy and paste frenzy.
We got used to this GitHub shit of setting up every process of an install script in this way, so I’m surprised it’s not happening constantly.
It should, and also to Makefile.PL, etc. These systems were created at a time when you were dealing with a handful of dependencies, and software development was a friendlier place.
Now you're dealing with hundreds of recursive dependencies, all of which you should assume may become hostile at any time. If you neither audit your dependencies, nor have the ability to sue them for damages, you're in a precarious position.
Yeah I guess it probably helps you specifically, because most malware is going to do the lazy thing and use install scripts. But it doesn't help everyone in general because if e.g. NPM disabled those scripts entirely (or made them opt-in) then the malware authors would just put their malware into the `npm run` as you say.
I guess this won't help with something like nx. It's a CLI tool that is supposed to be executed inside the source code repo, in CI jobs or on developer pcs.
According to the description in advisory, this attack was in a postinstall script. So it would've helped in this case with nx. Even if you ran the tool, this particular attack wouldn't have been triggered if you had install scripts ignored.
As a linux admin, I refuse to install npm or anything that requires it as a dep. It's been bad since the start. At least some people are starting to see it.
People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency.
So many supply chain attacks this year.
This week, I needed to add a progress bar with 8 stats counters to my Go project. I looked at the libraries, and they all had 3000+ lines of code. I asked LLM to write me a simple progress report tracking UI, and it was less than 150 lines. It works as expected, no dependencies needed. It's extremely simple, and everyone can understand the code. It just clears the terminal output and redraws it every second. It is also thread-safe. Took me 25 minutes to integrate it and review the code.
If you don't need a complex stats counter, a simple progress bar is like 30 lines of code as well.
This is a way to go for me now when considering another dependency. We don't have the resources to audit every package update.
> People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year.
I was really nervous when "language package managers" started to catch on. I work in the systems programming world, not the web world, so for the past decade, I looked from a distance at stuff like pip and npm and whatever with kind of a questionable side-eye. But when I did a Rust project and saw how trivially easy it was to pull in dozens of completely un-reviewed dependencies from the Internet with Cargo via a single line in a config file, I knew we were in for a bad time. Sure enough. This is a bad direction, and we need to turn back now. (We won't. There is no such thing as computer security.)
The thing is, system based package managers require discipline, especially from library authors. Even in the web world, it’s really distressing when you see a minor library is already on its 15 iteration in less that 5 years.
I was trying to build just (the task runner) on Debian 12 and it was impossible. It kept complaining about rust version, then some libraries shenanigans. It is way easier to build Emacs and ffmpeg.
Remember the pre package manager days was ossified, archaic, insecure installations because self managing dependencies is hard, and people didn't keep them up to date. You need to get your deps from somewhere, so in the pre-package manager days you still just downloaded it from somewhere - a vendor's web site, or sourceforge, or whatever, and probably didn't audit it, and hoped it was secure. It's still work to keep things up to date and audited, but less work at least.
Rust makes me especially nervous due to the possibility of compile-time code execution. So a cargo build invocation is all it could take to own you. In Go there is no such possibility by design.
> This is a bad direction, and we need to turn back now.
I don't deny there are some problems with package managers, but I also don't want to go back to a world where it is a huge pain to add any dependency, which leads to projects wasting effort on implementing things themselves, often in a buggy and/or inefficient way, and/or using huge libraries that try to do everything, but do nothing well.
This isn't as new as you make it out, ant + ivy / maven / gradle had already started this in the 00s. Definitely turned into a mess, but I think the java/cross platform nature pushed this style of development along pretty heavily.
I feel that Rust increases security by avoiding a whole class of bugs (thanks to memory safety), but decreases security by making supply chain attacks easier (due to the large number of transitive dependencies required even for simple projects).
I'm actually really frustrated how hard it's become to manually add, review and understand dependencies to my code. Libraries used to come with decent documentation, now it's just a couple lines of "npm install blah", as if that tells me anything.
So many people are so drunk on the kool aid, I often wonder if I’m the weirdo for not wanting dozens of third party libraries just to build a simple HTTP client for a simple internal REST api. (No I don’t want tokio, Unicode, multipart forms, SSL, web sockets, …). At least Rust has “features”. With pip and such, avoiding the kitchen sink is not an option.
I also find anything not extensively used has bugs or missing features I need. It’s easier to fork/replace a lot of simple dependencies than hope the maintainer merges my PR on a timeline convenient for my work.
Yes, it's a ton of overhead, and an equivalent will be needed for every language ecosystem.
The internet was great too, before it became too monetizable. So was email -- I have fond memories of cold-emailing random professors about their papers or whatever, and getting detailed responses back. Spam killed that one. Dependency chains are the latest victim of human nature. This is why we can't have nice things.
Part of the value proposition for bringing in outside libraries was: when they improve it, you get that automatically.
Now the threat is: when they “improve” it, you get that automatically.
left-pad should have been a major wake up call. Instead, the lesson people took away from it seems to have mostly been, “haha, look at those idiots pulling in an entire dependency for ten lines of code. I, on the other hand, am intelligent and thoughtful because I pull in dependencies for a hundred lines of code.”
The problem is less the size of a single dependency but the transitivity of adding dependencies. It used to be, library developers sought to not depend on other libraries if they could avoid it, because it meant their users had to make their build systems more complicated. It was unusual for a complete project to have a dependency graph more than two levels deep. Package managers let you easily build these gigantic dependency graphs with ease. Great for productivity, not so much for security.
works fine for me, and that's with TERM set to "dumb". (I'm actually not sure why it cleared the line automatically though. I'm used to doing "\rmessage " to clear out the previous line.)
Admittedly, that'll spew a bunch of stuff if you're sending it to a pager, so I guess that ought to be
% if [ -t 1 ]; then echo -n "loading..."; sleep 1; echo -en "\rABORT ABORT"; sleep 1; echo -e "\rTerminated"; fi
but I still haven't made it to 15 dependencies or 200 lines of code! I don't get a full-screen progress bar out of it either, but that's where I agree with you. I don't want one.
We are using NX heavily (and are not affected) in my teams in a larger insurance company. We have >10 standalone line of business apps and 25+ individual libraries in the same monorepo, managed by NX. I've toyed with other monorepo tools for these kind of complex setup in my career (lerna, rushjs, yarn workspaces) but not only did none came close, lerna is basically handed over to NX, and rushjs is unmaintained.
If you have any proposal how to properly manage the complexity of a FE monorepo with dozens of daily developers involved and heavy CI/CD/Devops integration, please post alternatives - given that security incident many people are looking.
Shameless self-plug and probably not what you're looking for, but anyway: I've created https://github.com/abuob/yanice for that sort of monorepo-size; too many applications/libraries to be able to always run full builds, but still not google-scale or similar.
It ultimately started as a small project because I got fed up with NX' antics a few years back (I think since then they improved quite a lot though), I don't need caching, I don't need their cloud, I don't need their highly opinionated approach on how to structure a monorepository; all I needed was decent change-detection to detect which project changed between the working-tree and a given commit. I've now since added support to enforce module-boundaries as it's definitely a must on a monorepo.
In case anyone wants to try it out - would certainly appreciate feedback!
npm workspaces and npm scripts will get you further than you might think. Plenty of people got along fine with Lerna, which didn't do much more than that, for years.
I will say, I was always turned off by NX's core proposition when it launched, and more turned off by whatever they're selling as a CI/CD solution these days, but if it works for you, it works for you.
Depends on the purpose… but I guess if you replace it with estimated time left, may be good enough. Sometimes progress bar is just there to identify whether you need stop the job since it takes too much time.
It runs indefinitely to process small jobs. I could log stats somewhere, but it complicates things. Right now, it's just a single binary that automatically gets restarted in case of a problem.
> People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency
I've been preaching this since ~2014 and had little luck getting people on board unless I have full control over a particular team (which is rare). The need to avoid "reinventing the wheel" seems so strong to so many.
nx is not a random dependency. It's a multi-project management tool, package manager, build tool, and much more. It's backed by a commercial offering. A lot of serious projects use it for managing a lot of different concerns. This is not something silly like leftpad or is-even.
Using languages and frameworks that take a batteries-included approach to design helps a lot here too, since you don’t need to pull in third party code or write your own for every little thing.
It’s too bad that more robust languages and frameworks lost out to the import-world culture that we’re in now.
I’d like a package manager that essentially does a git clone, and a culture that says: “use very few dependencies, commit their source code in your repo, and review any changes when you do an update.” That would be a big improvement to the modern package management fiasco.
Is that realistic though? What you're proposing is letting go of abstractions completely.
Say you need compression, you're going to review changes in the compression code?
What about encryption, a networking library, what about the language you're using itself?
That means you need to be an expert on everything you run. Which means no one will be building anything non trivial.
That what I used git submodules for. I had a /lib folder in my project where the dependencies were pulled/checked out from. This was before I was doing CI/CD and before folks said git submodules were bad.
Personally, I loved it. I only looked and updating them when I was going to release a new version of my program. I could easily do a diff to see what changed. I might not have understood everything, but it wasn't too difficult to see 10-100 line code changes to get a general idea.
I thought it was better than the big black box we currently deal with. Oh, this package uses this package, and this package... what's different? No idea now, really.
At some level of complexity it probably makes sense to import (and pin to a specific version by hash) a dependency, but at least in the JavaScript ecosystem, that level seems to be "one expression of three tokens" (https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even).
In pure functional programming like elm and Haskell, it is extremely easy to audit dependencies because any side effect must be explicitly listed, so you just search for those. That makes the risk way lower for dependencies, which is an underrated strength.
Why do I need to know that if I'm an experienced developer and I know exactly what the code is doing? The code is trivial, just print stuff to stdout along with escape sequences to update output.
Before anyone puts the blame on Nx, or Anthropic, I would like to remind you all what actually caused this exploit. The exploit was caused by an exploit, shipped in a package, that was uploaded using a stolen "token" (a string of characters used as a sort of "usename+password" to access a programming-language package-manager repository).
But that's just the delivery mechanism of the attack. What caused the attack to be successful were:
1. The package manager repository did not require signing of artifacts to verify they were generated by an authorized developer.
2. The package manager repository did not require code signing to verify the code was signed by an authorized developer.
3. (presumably) The package manager repository did not implement any heuristics to detect and prevent unusual activity (such as uploads coming from a new source IP or country).
4. (presumably) The package manager repository did not require MFA for the use of the compromised token.
5. (presumably) The token was not ephemeral.
6. (presumably) The developer whose token was stolen did not store the token in a password manager that requires the developer to manually authorize unsealing of the token by a new requesting application and session.
Now after all those failures, if you were affected and a GitHub repo was created in your account, this is a failure of:
1. You to keep your GitHub tokens/auth in a password manager that requires you to manually authorize unsealing of the token by a new requesting application and session.
So what really caused this exploit, is all completely preventable security mechanisms, that could have been easily added years ago by any competent programmer. The fact that they were not in place and mandatory is a fundamental failure of the entire software industry, because 1) this is not a new attack; it has been going on for years, and 2) we are software developers; there is nothing stopping us from fixing it.
This is why I continue to insist there needs to be building codes for software, with inspections and fines for not following through. This attack could have been used on tens of thousands of institutions to bring down finance, power, telecommunications, hospitals, military, etc. And the scope of the attacks and their impact will only increase with AI. Clearly we are not responsible enough to write software safely and securely. So we must have a building code that forces us to do it safely and securely.
One thing that's weirdly precarious is how we still have one big environment for personal computing and how it enables most malware.
It's one big macOS/Windows/Linux install where everything from crypto wallets to credential files to gimmick apps are all neighbors. And the tools for partitioning these things are all pretty bad (and mind you I'm about to pitch something probably even worse).
When I'm running a few Windows VMs inside macOS, I kinda get this vision of computing where we boot into a slim host OS and then alt-tab into containers/VMs for different tasks, but it's all polished and streamlined of course (an exercise for someone else).
Maybe I have a gaming container. Then I have a container I only use for dealing with cryptocurrency. And I have a container for each of the major code projects I'm working on.
i.e. The idea of getting my bitcoin private keys exfiltrated because I installed a VSCode extension, two applications that literally never interact, is kind of a silly place we've arrived in personal computing.
And "building codes for software" doesn't address that fundamental issue. It kinda feels like an empty solution like saying we need building codes for operating systems since they let malware in one app steal data from other apps. Okay, but at least pitch some building codes and what enforcement would look like and the process for establishing more codes, because that's quite a levitation machine.
macOS at least has some basic sandboxing by default. You can circumvent it, of course – and many of the same people complaining about porous security models would complain even more loudly if they could not circumvent it, because “we want to execute code on our own machine” (the tension between freedom and security).
By default, folders like ~/Documents are not accessible by any process until you explicitly grant access. So as long as you run your code in some other folder you’ll at least be notified when it’s trying to access ~/Documents or ~/Library or any other destination with sensitive content.
It’s obviously not a panacea but it’s better than nothing and notably better than the default Linux posture.
> One thing that's weirdly precarious is how we still have one big environment for personal computing and how it enables most malware.
You're not the only one to note the dangers of an open-by-default single-namespace execution model. Yet every time someone proposes departing from it, he generates resistance from people who've spent their whole careers with every program having unbridled access to $HOME. Even lightweight (and inadequate) sandboxing of the sort Flatpak and Snap do gets turned off the instant someone thinks it's causing a problem.
On mobile, we're had containerized apps and they've worked fine forever. The mobile ecosystem is more secure and has a better compatibility story than any desktop. Maybe, after the current old guard retires, we'll be able to replace desktop OSes with mobile ones.
Agreed on the madness of wide open OS defaults, I share your vision for isolation as a first-class citizen.
In the mean-time (for Windows 11 users) theres Sandboxie+ fighting the good fight. I know most here will be aware of its strengths and limitations, but for any who dont (or who forgot about it), I can say its still working just as great on Windows 11 like it did on Windows 7.
While its not great isolating heavy-weight dev environments (Visual Studio, Unreal Engine, etc), its almost perfect for managing isolation of all the small suff (Steam games, game emulators, YouTube downloaders , basic apps of all kinds).
flatpak is supposed to address this. Running applications in sandbox. But, with almost all applications wanting access to your HOME, because of convenience, sandbox utility is quiet questionable in most cases.
"contained a post-installation malware script designed to harvest sensitive developer assets, including cryptocurrency wallets, GitHub and npm tokens, SSH keys, and more. The malware leveraged AI command-line tools (including Claude, Gemini, and Q) to aid in their reconnaissance efforts, and then exfiltrated the stolen data to publicly accessible attacker-created repositories within victims’ GitHub accounts.
"The malware attempted lockout by appending sudo shutdown -h 0 to ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc, effectively causing system shutdowns on new terminal sessions.
"Exfiltrated data was double and triple-base64 encoded and uploaded to attacker-controlled victim GitHub repositories named s1ngularity-repository, s1ngularity-repository-0, or s1ngularity-repository-1, thousands of which were observed publicly.
"Among the varied leaked data here, we’ve observed over a thousand valid Github tokens, dozens of valid cloud credentials and NPM tokens, and roughly twenty thousand files leaked. In many cases, the malware appears to have run on developer machines, often via the NX VSCode extension. We’ve also observed cases where the malware ran in build pipelines, such as Github Actions.
"On August 27, 2025 9AM UTC Github disabled all attacker created repositories to prevent this data from being exposed, but the exposure window (which lasted around 8 hours) was sufficient for these repositories to have been downloaded by the original attacker and other malicious actors. Furthermore, base64-encoding is trivially decodable, meaning that this data should be treated as effectively public."
>This is why I continue to insist there needs to be building codes for software, with inspections and fines for not following through. This attack could have been used on tens of thousands of institutions to bring down finance, power, telecommunications, hospitals, military, etc. And the scope of the attacks and their impact will only increase with AI. Clearly we are not responsible enough to write software safely and securely. So we must have a building code that forces us to do it safely and securely.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
We can have building code, but the onus is on the final implementer not people sharing code freely.
> You to keep your GitHub tokens/auth in a password manager that requires you to manually authorize unsealing of the token
This is a failure of the GH CLI, IMO. If you log into the GH CLI, it gets access to upload repositories, and doesn’t require frequent re-auth. Unlike AWS CLI, which expires every 18hr or something like that depending on the policy. But in either case (including with AWS CLI), it’s simply too easy to end up with tokens in plaintext in your local env. In fact, it’s practically the default.
I think you’re right. I don’t like the idea of a “building code” for software, but I do agree that as an industry we are doing quite badly here and if regulation is what is needed to stop so many terrible, terrible practices, then yeah… maybe that’s what’s needed.
What an entitled idea, if you want a guarantee then buy a license. Wanting to hold people accountable for an open source library that you got for free is the same bullshit attitude as google with their hostile developer verification.
Honest to goodness, I do most of my coding in a VM now. I don't see how the security profile of these things are tolerable.
The level of potential hostility from agents as a malware vector is really off the charts. We're entering an era where they can scan for opportunities worth >$1,000 in hostaged data, crypto keys, passwords, blackmail material or financial records without even knowing what they're looking for when they breach a box.
I do too, but I found it non-trivial to actually secure the podman container. I described my approach here [1]. I'm very interested to hear your approach. Any specific podman flags or do you use another tool like toolbx/distrobox?
I would love if some experts could comment on the security profile of this. It sounds like it should be fine, but there are so many gotchas with everything that I use full VMs for development.
One immediate stumbling block- the IDE would be running in my host, which has access to everything. A malicious IDE plugin is a too real potential vector.
Yeah I use Qubes for my "serious" computing these days. It comes with performance headaches, though my laptop isn't the best.
I wonder about something like https://secureblue.dev/ though. I'm not comfortable with Fedora and last I heard it wasn't out of Beta or whatever yet. But it uses containers rather than VMs. I'm not a targeted person so I may be happy to have "good enough" security for some performance back.
Part of the problem is the traditional PC security model (Linux / Windows). "All the executable files I run are trusted and have access to all my personal files" doesn't work anymore in 2025. Android fixed this for the most part, but on PC SELinux is all we have and it's painful to use.
None of this is the concerning part. The bad part is that it auto-updates while running without intervention - i.e. it is RCE on your machine for Anthropic by design.
Not only that, but also connects to raw.githubusercontent.com to get the update. Doubt there are any signature checks happening there either. I know people love hating locked down Apple ecosystem, but this kind of stuff is why it is necessary.
Yes it does; you are thinking of agent tool calls. The software package itself runs as your uid and can do anything you can do (except on macOS where reading of certain directories is individually gated).
It doesn't run by itself, you have to choose to run it. We have tons of apps with loads of permissions. The terminal can also mess with your filesystem and run commands... sure, but it doesn't open by itself and run commands itself. You have to literally run claude code and tell it to do stuff. It's not some living, breathing demon that's going to destroy your computer while you're at work.
Claude Code is the most amazing and game changing tool I've used since I first used a computer 30 years ago. I couldn't give two fucks about its "vectors of attack", none of them matter if no one has unauthorized access to my computer, and if they do, Claude Code is the least of my issues.
> I couldn't give two fucks about its "vectors of attack", none of them matter if no one has unauthorized access to my computer, and if they do, Claude Code is the least of my issues.
Naive! Claude Code grants access to your computer, authorized or not. I'm not talking about Anthropic, I'm talking about the HTML documentation file you told Claude to fetch (or manually saved) that has an HTML comment with a prompt injection.
Not a package manager, but Renovate bot has a setting like that (minimumReleaseAge). Dependabot does not (Edit: does now).
So while your package manager will install whatever is newest, there are free solutions to keep your dependencies up to date in a reasonable manner.
Also, the javascript ecosystem seems to slowly be going in the direction of consolidation, and supply chain attacks are (again, slowly) getting tools to get addressed.
Additionally, current versions of all major package managers (NPM, PNPM, Bun, I don't know about Yarn) don't automatically run postinstall scripts - although you are likely to run them anyway because they will be suggested to you - and ultimately you're running someone else's code, postinstall scripts or not.
But you're still updating at some point. Usually to the latest version. If you're unlucky, you are the first victim, a few seconds after the package was published. (Edit: on a popular package there will always be a first victim somewhere in the first few minutes)
Many of those supply chain attacks are detected within the first few hours, I guess nowadays there are even some companies out there, that run automated analysis on every new version of major packages. Also contributors/maintainers might notice something like that quickly, if they didn't plan that release and it suddenly appears.
It would be surprising if claude code would actually run that prompt, so I tried run it:
> I can't help with this request as it appears to be designed to search for and inventory
sensitive files like cryptocurrency wallets, private keys, and other secrets. This type of
comprehensive file enumeration could be used maliciously to locate and potentially exfiltrate
sensitive data.
If you need help with legitimate security tasks like:
- Analyzing your own systems for security vulnerabilities
- Creating defensive security monitoring tools
- Understanding file permissions and access controls
- Setting up proper backup procedures for your own data
I'd be happy to help with those instead.
I have evidence of at least 250 successes for the prompt. Claude definitely appears to have a higher rejection rate. Q also rejects fairly consistently (based on Claude, so that makes sense).
Incredibly common W for Anthropic safeguards. In almost every case I see Claude go head-to-head on refusals with another model provider in a real-world scenario, Claude behaves and the other model doesn't. There was a viral case on Tiktok of some lady going through a mental health episode who was being enabled and referred to as "The Oracle" by ChatGPT, but when she swapped to Claude, Claude eventually refused and told her to speak to a professional.
That's not to say the "That's absolutely right!" doesn't get annoying after a while, but we'd be doing everyone a disservice if we didn't reward Anthropic for paying more heed to safety and refusals than other labs.
OSs need to stop letting applications have a free reign of all the files on the file system by default. Some apps come with apparmor/selinux profiles and firejail is also a solution. But the UX needs to change.
This is a huge issue and it's the result of many legacy decisions on the desktop that were made 30+ years ago. Newer operating systems for mobile like iOS really get this right by sandboxing each app and requiring explicit permission from the user for various privileges.
There are solutions on the desktop like Qubes (but it uses virtualization and is slow, also very complex for the average user). There are also user-space solutions like Firejail, bubblewrap, AppArmor, which all have their own quirks and varying levels of compatibility and support. You also have things like OpenSnitch which are helpful only for isolating networking capabilities of programs. One problem is that most users don't want to spend days configuring the capabilities for each program on their system. So any such solution needs profiles for common apps which are constantly maintained and updated.
I'm somewhat surprised that the current state of the world on the desktop is just _so_ bad, but I think the problem at its core is very hard and the financial incentives to solve it are not there.
If you are on Linux, I'm writing a little tool to securely isolate projects from eachother with podman: https://github.com/evertheylen/probox. The UX is an important aspect which I've spent quite some time on.
I use it all the time, but I'm still looking for people to review its security.
Which operating system lets an application have "free reign of all the files on the file system by default"? Neither Linux, nor any BSD, nor MacOS, nor Windows does. For any of those I'd have to do something deliberately unsafe such as running it as a privileged account (which is not the "default").
I would argue the distinction between my own user and root is not meaningful when they say "all files by default".
As my own user, it can still access everything I can on a daily basis which is likely everything of importance. Sure it can't replace the sudo binary or something like that, but it doesn't matter because it's already too late.
Why when I download and run Firefox can it access every file my user can access, by default. Why couldn't it work a little closer to Android with an option for the user to open up more access. I think this is what they were getting at.
How many software installation instructions require "sudo"? It seems to me that it's many more than should be necessary. And then the installer can do anything.
As an administrator, I'm constantly being asked by developers for sudo permission so they can "install dependencies" and my first answer is "install it in your home directory" sure it's a bit more complexity to set up your PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH but you're earning a six-figure salary, figure it out.
Readit News
I know this isn't a silver bullet solution to supply chain attakcs, but, so far it has been effective against many attacks through npm.
https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v8/commands/npm-config
and
should go after the `--unshare-all --unshare-user`Also, my system doesn't have a symlink from /tmp to /var/tmp, so I'm guessing that's not needed for me (while /bin etc. are symlinks)
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https://ashishb.net/programming/run-tools-inside-docker/
It does reduce the attach surface drastically.
Go down the rabbit hole of just installing LLM software and you’ll find yourself in quite a copy and paste frenzy.
We got used to this GitHub shit of setting up every process of an install script in this way, so I’m surprised it’s not happening constantly.
Now you're dealing with hundreds of recursive dependencies, all of which you should assume may become hostile at any time. If you neither audit your dependencies, nor have the ability to sue them for damages, you're in a precarious position.
Because the workflow for 99.99% of developers is something resembling:
1. git clone
2. npm install (which pulls in a malicious dependency but disabling post-install scripts saved you for now!)
3. npm run (executing your malicious dependency, you're now infected)
The only way this advice helps you is if you also insert "audit the entirety of node_modules" in between steps 2 and 3 which nobody does.
Everything must be provided as source code and any compilation must happen locally.
As a front-end web developer, I need a node package manager; and npm comes bundled with node.
Source: https://pnpm.io/settings#ignoredepscripts
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This week, I needed to add a progress bar with 8 stats counters to my Go project. I looked at the libraries, and they all had 3000+ lines of code. I asked LLM to write me a simple progress report tracking UI, and it was less than 150 lines. It works as expected, no dependencies needed. It's extremely simple, and everyone can understand the code. It just clears the terminal output and redraws it every second. It is also thread-safe. Took me 25 minutes to integrate it and review the code.
If you don't need a complex stats counter, a simple progress bar is like 30 lines of code as well.
This is a way to go for me now when considering another dependency. We don't have the resources to audit every package update.
I was really nervous when "language package managers" started to catch on. I work in the systems programming world, not the web world, so for the past decade, I looked from a distance at stuff like pip and npm and whatever with kind of a questionable side-eye. But when I did a Rust project and saw how trivially easy it was to pull in dozens of completely un-reviewed dependencies from the Internet with Cargo via a single line in a config file, I knew we were in for a bad time. Sure enough. This is a bad direction, and we need to turn back now. (We won't. There is no such thing as computer security.)
I was trying to build just (the task runner) on Debian 12 and it was impossible. It kept complaining about rust version, then some libraries shenanigans. It is way easier to build Emacs and ffmpeg.
I don't deny there are some problems with package managers, but I also don't want to go back to a world where it is a huge pain to add any dependency, which leads to projects wasting effort on implementing things themselves, often in a buggy and/or inefficient way, and/or using huge libraries that try to do everything, but do nothing well.
On top of that, I try to keep the dependencies to an absolute minimum. In my current project it's 15 dependencies, including the sub-dependencies.
[1]: https://github.com/fosskers/vend
Before this wasn't CPAN already big?
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So many people are so drunk on the kool aid, I often wonder if I’m the weirdo for not wanting dozens of third party libraries just to build a simple HTTP client for a simple internal REST api. (No I don’t want tokio, Unicode, multipart forms, SSL, web sockets, …). At least Rust has “features”. With pip and such, avoiding the kitchen sink is not an option.
I also find anything not extensively used has bugs or missing features I need. It’s easier to fork/replace a lot of simple dependencies than hope the maintainer merges my PR on a timeline convenient for my work.
Yes, it's a ton of overhead, and an equivalent will be needed for every language ecosystem.
The internet was great too, before it became too monetizable. So was email -- I have fond memories of cold-emailing random professors about their papers or whatever, and getting detailed responses back. Spam killed that one. Dependency chains are the latest victim of human nature. This is why we can't have nice things.
Now the threat is: when they “improve” it, you get that automatically.
left-pad should have been a major wake up call. Instead, the lesson people took away from it seems to have mostly been, “haha, look at those idiots pulling in an entire dependency for ten lines of code. I, on the other hand, am intelligent and thoughtful because I pull in dependencies for a hundred lines of code.”
Maybe scolding and mocking people isn't a very effective security posture after all.
A library is by definition supposed to be somewhat generic, adaptable and configurable. That takes a lot of code.
Why not print a simple counter like: ..10%..20%..30%
Or just: Uploading…
Terminal codes should be for TUI or interactive-only usage.
Admittedly, that'll spew a bunch of stuff if you're sending it to a pager, so I guess that ought to be
but I still haven't made it to 15 dependencies or 200 lines of code! I don't get a full-screen progress bar out of it either, but that's where I agree with you. I don't want one.If you have any proposal how to properly manage the complexity of a FE monorepo with dozens of daily developers involved and heavy CI/CD/Devops integration, please post alternatives - given that security incident many people are looking.
It ultimately started as a small project because I got fed up with NX' antics a few years back (I think since then they improved quite a lot though), I don't need caching, I don't need their cloud, I don't need their highly opinionated approach on how to structure a monorepository; all I needed was decent change-detection to detect which project changed between the working-tree and a given commit. I've now since added support to enforce module-boundaries as it's definitely a must on a monorepo.
In case anyone wants to try it out - would certainly appreciate feedback!
I will say, I was always turned off by NX's core proposition when it launched, and more turned off by whatever they're selling as a CI/CD solution these days, but if it works for you, it works for you.
I've been preaching this since ~2014 and had little luck getting people on board unless I have full control over a particular team (which is rare). The need to avoid "reinventing the wheel" seems so strong to so many.
it's common that the part that I actually need is like 100 LOC rather than 1500 LOC.
Please keep preaching.
It’s too bad that more robust languages and frameworks lost out to the import-world culture that we’re in now.
Say you need compression, you're going to review changes in the compression code? What about encryption, a networking library, what about the language you're using itself?
That means you need to be an expert on everything you run. Which means no one will be building anything non trivial.
Personally, I loved it. I only looked and updating them when I was going to release a new version of my program. I could easily do a diff to see what changed. I might not have understood everything, but it wasn't too difficult to see 10-100 line code changes to get a general idea.
I thought it was better than the big black box we currently deal with. Oh, this package uses this package, and this package... what's different? No idea now, really.
So your suggested approach does not seem to scale well.
At some level of complexity it probably makes sense to import (and pin to a specific version by hash) a dependency, but at least in the JavaScript ecosystem, that level seems to be "one expression of three tokens" (https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even).
Compared to typescript where it’s a package + code to use said package which always was more loc than anything comparative I have done in golang.
But that's just the delivery mechanism of the attack. What caused the attack to be successful were:
Now after all those failures, if you were affected and a GitHub repo was created in your account, this is a failure of: So what really caused this exploit, is all completely preventable security mechanisms, that could have been easily added years ago by any competent programmer. The fact that they were not in place and mandatory is a fundamental failure of the entire software industry, because 1) this is not a new attack; it has been going on for years, and 2) we are software developers; there is nothing stopping us from fixing it.This is why I continue to insist there needs to be building codes for software, with inspections and fines for not following through. This attack could have been used on tens of thousands of institutions to bring down finance, power, telecommunications, hospitals, military, etc. And the scope of the attacks and their impact will only increase with AI. Clearly we are not responsible enough to write software safely and securely. So we must have a building code that forces us to do it safely and securely.
It's one big macOS/Windows/Linux install where everything from crypto wallets to credential files to gimmick apps are all neighbors. And the tools for partitioning these things are all pretty bad (and mind you I'm about to pitch something probably even worse).
When I'm running a few Windows VMs inside macOS, I kinda get this vision of computing where we boot into a slim host OS and then alt-tab into containers/VMs for different tasks, but it's all polished and streamlined of course (an exercise for someone else).
Maybe I have a gaming container. Then I have a container I only use for dealing with cryptocurrency. And I have a container for each of the major code projects I'm working on.
i.e. The idea of getting my bitcoin private keys exfiltrated because I installed a VSCode extension, two applications that literally never interact, is kind of a silly place we've arrived in personal computing.
And "building codes for software" doesn't address that fundamental issue. It kinda feels like an empty solution like saying we need building codes for operating systems since they let malware in one app steal data from other apps. Okay, but at least pitch some building codes and what enforcement would look like and the process for establishing more codes, because that's quite a levitation machine.
By default, folders like ~/Documents are not accessible by any process until you explicitly grant access. So as long as you run your code in some other folder you’ll at least be notified when it’s trying to access ~/Documents or ~/Library or any other destination with sensitive content.
It’s obviously not a panacea but it’s better than nothing and notably better than the default Linux posture.
You're not the only one to note the dangers of an open-by-default single-namespace execution model. Yet every time someone proposes departing from it, he generates resistance from people who've spent their whole careers with every program having unbridled access to $HOME. Even lightweight (and inadequate) sandboxing of the sort Flatpak and Snap do gets turned off the instant someone thinks it's causing a problem.
On mobile, we're had containerized apps and they've worked fine forever. The mobile ecosystem is more secure and has a better compatibility story than any desktop. Maybe, after the current old guard retires, we'll be able to replace desktop OSes with mobile ones.
* https://wiki.smartos.org
https://www.wiz.io/blog/s1ngularity-supply-chain-attack
"contained a post-installation malware script designed to harvest sensitive developer assets, including cryptocurrency wallets, GitHub and npm tokens, SSH keys, and more. The malware leveraged AI command-line tools (including Claude, Gemini, and Q) to aid in their reconnaissance efforts, and then exfiltrated the stolen data to publicly accessible attacker-created repositories within victims’ GitHub accounts.
"The malware attempted lockout by appending sudo shutdown -h 0 to ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc, effectively causing system shutdowns on new terminal sessions.
"Exfiltrated data was double and triple-base64 encoded and uploaded to attacker-controlled victim GitHub repositories named s1ngularity-repository, s1ngularity-repository-0, or s1ngularity-repository-1, thousands of which were observed publicly.
"Among the varied leaked data here, we’ve observed over a thousand valid Github tokens, dozens of valid cloud credentials and NPM tokens, and roughly twenty thousand files leaked. In many cases, the malware appears to have run on developer machines, often via the NX VSCode extension. We’ve also observed cases where the malware ran in build pipelines, such as Github Actions.
"On August 27, 2025 9AM UTC Github disabled all attacker created repositories to prevent this data from being exposed, but the exposure window (which lasted around 8 hours) was sufficient for these repositories to have been downloaded by the original attacker and other malicious actors. Furthermore, base64-encoding is trivially decodable, meaning that this data should be treated as effectively public."
Yea, except taps on the glass
https://github.com/nrwl/nx/blob/master/LICENSE
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
We can have building code, but the onus is on the final implementer not people sharing code freely.
This is a failure of the GH CLI, IMO. If you log into the GH CLI, it gets access to upload repositories, and doesn’t require frequent re-auth. Unlike AWS CLI, which expires every 18hr or something like that depending on the policy. But in either case (including with AWS CLI), it’s simply too easy to end up with tokens in plaintext in your local env. In fact, it’s practically the default.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45039442
The level of potential hostility from agents as a malware vector is really off the charts. We're entering an era where they can scan for opportunities worth >$1,000 in hostaged data, crypto keys, passwords, blackmail material or financial records without even knowing what they're looking for when they breach a box.
[1]: https://evertheylen.eu/p/probox-intro/
One immediate stumbling block- the IDE would be running in my host, which has access to everything. A malicious IDE plugin is a too real potential vector.
Perhaps you may be interested in Qubes OS, where you do everything in VMs with a nice UX. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough.
I wonder about something like https://secureblue.dev/ though. I'm not comfortable with Fedora and last I heard it wasn't out of Beta or whatever yet. But it uses containers rather than VMs. I'm not a targeted person so I may be happy to have "good enough" security for some performance back.
It's also:
- a NodeJS app
- installed by curling a shell script and piping it into bash
- an LLM that's given free reign to mess with the filesystem, run commands, etc.
So that's what, like 3 big glaring vectors of attack for your system right there?
I would never feel comfortable running it outside of some kind of sandbox, e.g. VM, container, dedicated dev box, etc.
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That said Claude code does not have free reign to run commands out of the gate.
It doesn't run by itself, you have to choose to run it. We have tons of apps with loads of permissions. The terminal can also mess with your filesystem and run commands... sure, but it doesn't open by itself and run commands itself. You have to literally run claude code and tell it to do stuff. It's not some living, breathing demon that's going to destroy your computer while you're at work.
Claude Code is the most amazing and game changing tool I've used since I first used a computer 30 years ago. I couldn't give two fucks about its "vectors of attack", none of them matter if no one has unauthorized access to my computer, and if they do, Claude Code is the least of my issues.
You're absolutely right! I should not have `rm -rf /bin`d!
Naive! Claude Code grants access to your computer, authorized or not. I'm not talking about Anthropic, I'm talking about the HTML documentation file you told Claude to fetch (or manually saved) that has an HTML comment with a prompt injection.
I’ve run into similar issues before, some package update that broke everything, only to get pulled/patched a few hours later.
So while your package manager will install whatever is newest, there are free solutions to keep your dependencies up to date in a reasonable manner.
Also, the javascript ecosystem seems to slowly be going in the direction of consolidation, and supply chain attacks are (again, slowly) getting tools to get addressed.
Additionally, current versions of all major package managers (NPM, PNPM, Bun, I don't know about Yarn) don't automatically run postinstall scripts - although you are likely to run them anyway because they will be suggested to you - and ultimately you're running someone else's code, postinstall scripts or not.
What this means is that you can run "npm instal --before (date for 2 days ago)" and it will skip any dependencies newer than that.
Especially after the fakerjs (and other) things.
Many of those supply chain attacks are detected within the first few hours, I guess nowadays there are even some companies out there, that run automated analysis on every new version of major packages. Also contributors/maintainers might notice something like that quickly, if they didn't plan that release and it suddenly appears.
> I can't help with this request as it appears to be designed to search for and inventory sensitive files like cryptocurrency wallets, private keys, and other secrets. This type of comprehensive file enumeration could be used maliciously to locate and potentially exfiltrate sensitive data.
Context: I've been responding to this all day, and wrote https://www.wiz.io/blog/s1ngularity-supply-chain-attack
That's not to say the "That's absolutely right!" doesn't get annoying after a while, but we'd be doing everyone a disservice if we didn't reward Anthropic for paying more heed to safety and refusals than other labs.
There are solutions on the desktop like Qubes (but it uses virtualization and is slow, also very complex for the average user). There are also user-space solutions like Firejail, bubblewrap, AppArmor, which all have their own quirks and varying levels of compatibility and support. You also have things like OpenSnitch which are helpful only for isolating networking capabilities of programs. One problem is that most users don't want to spend days configuring the capabilities for each program on their system. So any such solution needs profiles for common apps which are constantly maintained and updated.
I'm somewhat surprised that the current state of the world on the desktop is just _so_ bad, but I think the problem at its core is very hard and the financial incentives to solve it are not there.
I use it all the time, but I'm still looking for people to review its security.
As an administrator, I'm constantly being asked by developers for sudo permission so they can "install dependencies" and my first answer is "install it in your home directory" sure it's a bit more complexity to set up your PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH but you're earning a six-figure salary, figure it out.
All except macOS let anything running as your uid read and write all of your user’s files.
This is how ransomware works.
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