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this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Programming
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There has been instances of popular and well meaning projects become hijacked by hostile actors. A recent notable example is xz, but there’s also event-stream npm package a few years ago that got infected with Bitcoin stealing code.
Just because a protect looks good now doesn’t mean it won’t turn bad in the future.
And not only would you need to audit the project. You also need to audit all of its dependencies as well. The xz vulnerability made it in to SSH. Who would think about looking into xz for vulnerabilities?
The benefit of installing back doors can be enormous.
They're asking if the entire project is somehow fake, not if it's a real project that got backdoored. That's obviously impossible to tell just based on stars, language quality, and similar heuristic signals.