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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

This sounds nice in theory, but does it really solve the issue? I think that if no one's installing that package then no one is noticing the malware and no one is reporting that package either. It merely slightly improves the chances that author would notice a version they didn't release, but this doesn't work if author is not particularly actively working the compromised project.

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These days compromised packages are often detected automatically by software that scans all packages uploaded to npm like https://socket.dev or https://snyk.io. So I imagine it's still useful to have those services scan these packages first, before they go out to the masses.

Measures like this also aren't meant to be "final solutions" either, but stop-gaps. Slowing the spread can still be helpful when a large scale attack like this does occur. But I'm also not entirely sure how much that weighs against potentially slowing the discovery as well.

Ultimately this is still a repository problem and not a package manager one. These are merely band-aids. The responsibility lies with npm (the repository) to implement proper solutions here.

> The responsibility lies with

No, it doesn't solve the issue, but it probably helps.

And I agree that if everyone did this, it would slow down finding issues in new releases. Not really sure what to say to that... aside from the selfish idea that if I do it, but most other people don't, it won't affect me.

a long enough delay would solve the issue for account takeovers, and bold attacks like this.

It would not solve for a bad actor gaining trust over years, then contributing seemingly innocent code that contains an exploitable bug with enough plausible deniability to remain on the team after it is patched.

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