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Dozens of Red Hat packages backdoored through its official NPM channel
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Cybersecurity
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I'm beginning to think this "NPM" thing isn't a great idea.
Its always npm
I don't really see how it's NPM at fault here. This was caused by a malicious actor taking control of an account and putting out bad packages on it. It could happen on any package repository for any language
Trust by default for a atomic packaging system. Entirely NPM's fault.
My understanding is that for most package managers the signing keys are held by a smallish number of maintainers responsible for entire sections, who presumably keep those accounts pretty tightly secured. Not impossible to take over, but it's a smaller attack surface.
While for NPM as far as I know every uploader keeps their own account and there's not even signing keys to lose control of.
I've heard quite a few PyPi and Cargo attacks though, but I bet the main reason why hear NPM so much is simply because NPM is the biggest, and thus the most valuable target
I'm not familiar with npm but why is this always NPM? Is it a specific issue they have?
because it's the biggest. Just like how hackers target windows and not linux (assuming they are targeting users and not servers).
It's a "package manager" that has zero integrity checks built in. Web devs also love it. Nice combination.
Culture problem imo.