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Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

While this is possible, I'm willing to give the NPM team at least a little benefit of the doubt that they actually researched the access logs before they state this:

> We determined that access tokens for approximately 4,500 accounts could have been obtained before we acted to close this vulnerability. However, we have not found evidence that any tokens were actually obtained or used to access any npmjs.com account during this window.[1]

I get that it's possible that other modules could already be infected, but it's also true that other modules could have been similarly infected long before this one.

[1] https://blog.npmjs.org/post/175824896885/incident-report-npm...

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Your quote wonderfully illustrates that npm are either being obfuscatory or entirely missing the point.

How did they determine tokens for 4,500 accounts could have been obtained, and what is that even supposed to mean? The problem here is that any user of these packages could have had their .npmjs file read and exfiltrated, not just some upstream package maintainer. Were there only 4,500 valid npm tokens or something? I cannot imagine that is the case.

So either they looked at 4,500 packages uploaded during the compromise window and they're not explaining how they undertook to do that, or they don't understand the vector and are minimizing the severity of the issue.

I would assume their logs would possibly tell them which tokens were associated with the users that downloaded v3.7.2. npm probably doesn't need credentials to download a package so the number of downloads is likely higher. Determining other packages affected are another matter entirely and no one can say this attack vector is only bound by this specific date window. This could've been way more widespread unless they're unpacking payloads and grepping for key pieces of this specific attack.

I think it would be helpful if they could expose some of those logs but considering the meat of what matters would be the IP addresses to verify if your machine was compromised (or your CI server) that GPDR effectively wiped that possibility off the table. It would almost behoove them to setup a kind of haveibeenpwned service where you can check against stuff like this in the future. It's not like this can't happen again as the hole hasn't been closed completely, only this one set of compromised packages appears clean for now.

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