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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

It's easier to keep stuff up to date these days. If you have a project with typescript, unit tests, and end to end tests like cypress you can just have dependabot create the PRs to update packages. If everything passes you just have to hit the merge button.

Just updating everything is probably easier than assessing if it's possible to trigger an exploit with the way you use the package.

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This is exactly how developers of malware want you to behave. Update without really thinking about it.

I do wonder how long it will take before an attack is developed by submitting a semi-genuine vulnerability, shortly followed by a ‘fix’ including malicious code.

Dependency cooldowns fix most of those problems.

The cooldown setting in dependabot solves this attack vector. By setting it you give security vendors time to scan new packages.

Notably this does nothing to "solve" the attack vector. You've got a live bomb in front of you and you're adding 10s to the countdown hoping that _others_* find it and defuse it in that time period.

I would challenge anyone proposing this to define more than one party doing security checks on packages to prove the point that many projects are waving their hands nebulously around saying "security vendors" and then YOLO'ing code into their codebase because they didn't here the muses wailing.

Alternatively from the other direction - Point to any dependency in your project. How can you get *POSITIVE SIGNAL* that security vendors _did_ look at it and okay it? How much scrutiny did they put into it? At what version did they last inspect it?

With today's AI glut of tokens, multiple someones are scanning security checks against the changed code. The real problem, as was before, was getting anybody anywhere to pay enough attention for long enough.

Only if their scanning detects it though. Malware authors have incentive to figure out how to fool the tool. They don't even need to be right all the time, any attack that survives works for them, and creating accounts is easy.

Yep this is what has happened to small teams. You really only have time to approve the dependabot changes and go go go. Otherwise you'll never get anything productive done.

The other option is to simply ignore updates and do them on a schedule, e.g. once every 1-2 months.

Or you take the alternative approach of flattening and minimizing your dependency graph. Having so many dependencies you can't reasonably field bug reports in them is a chosen tradeoff, even if it doesn't feel that way.

In agreement with frodd above.

Dependencies and supply chain attacks are probably the greatest risk to a lot of software orgs, as they run them across all their environments: Development (with secrets and other valuable artefacts on developer VMs), CI/CD pipelines which may have access tokens to production (and other) environments, and production itself.

Notably even security companies are being impacted by this[0]. The scale of these attacks has amplified quite significantly the past three years, but are not solely exclusive to the javascript ecosystem [1] or even just namesquatting/typosquatting [2].

The resolution is broader security awareness, "onion layered" security controls and implementing simple non-burden inducing processes and policies. Sometimes not updating (what was wrong with the previous version of a dependency if there was no immediate vulnerability or production issue caused by it?) or having a two week cool down for updates (which some supply chain tooling natively supports) can appease some security functions through clear communication of the supply chain risk etc.

If anyone has interest in courses aligned to your org on improving developer and broader engineering management awareness on this, e-mails in my profile :).

[0] - https://socket.dev/blog/ongoing-supply-chain-attack-targets-...

[1] - https://orca.security/resources/blog/hades-pypi-supply-chain...

[2] - https://checkmarx.com/zero-post/python-pypi-supply-chain-att...

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