Veln

When event-stream was compromised in 2018, the attacker didn't hack npm. They asked the maintainer for access. Within days, a malicious version with a Bitcoin-stealing payload was installed by thousands of developers. The package looked legitimate. The maintainer's account was legitimate. The install command was identical.

PyPI is among the most-targeted package registries for supply chain attacks. Each year hundreds of malicious packages are identified on PyPI — most mimicking popular libraries like requests, boto3, and numpy. Many remain live for days before detection.

Most major npm and PyPI attacks in recent years have exploited the same gap: the hours between when a malicious package is published and when any threat feed knows about it. During that window, your npm install and pip install commands trust the registry completely. Nothing checks what you're actually downloading.