Supply Chain Attacks
In-depth guides and analysis on supply chain attacks from the Safeguard engineering team.
93 articles
The faker.js and colors.js Sabotage: What Maintainer-Driven Risk Teaches About Pinning
In January 2022 a trusted maintainer bricked two npm packages with a combined 26M+ weekly downloads — from his own account, with valid credentials.
How malicious Gemfile.lock entries redirect Ruby installs to attacker servers
A single unreviewed remote: line in Gemfile.lock can silently reroute a bundle install — here's how Ruby lockfile injection works and how to stop it.
The anatomy of a PyPI credential stealer
In a single 24-hour window in 2022, one actor shipped 12 malicious PyPI packages bundling Windows stealers that harvested browser, Discord, and Roblox credentials.
Dependency confusion on npm: how public-registry precedence became a delivery channel for post-exploitation frameworks
In May 2022, Snyk found 200+ malicious npm packages, including one that polled for commands until it dropped a Cobalt Strike trojan, and another that delayed 30 minutes to dodge sandboxes.
Reconstructing the tj-actions/changed-files compromise
CVE-2025-30066 hit CISA's KEV list within 3 days: 23,000+ repos ran a poisoned GitHub Action that dumped CI secrets straight into public build logs.
Inside the npm Reward-Farming Worm That Published 89,000+ Packages
One npm publishing bot exploited a crypto reward protocol to spam 89,000+ packages, some appearing every 7-10 seconds. Here's how it worked and how to spot it.
The npm worm incident response playbook
Shai-Hulud compromised 500+ npm packages by auto-publishing itself with stolen tokens. Here's a concrete detection, rotation, and pinning playbook.
Anatomy of an npm maintainer account takeover
A single phishing email hit eslint-config-prettier's ~30M weekly downloads in July 2025 — no code compromise needed, just a stolen npm login.
The Cursor IDE extension that stole $500K: a supply chain post-mortem
A fake 'Solidity Language' extension hit 50,000+ downloads on Open VSX before stealing $500K in crypto. Here's how IDE marketplaces became a trust gap.
Anatomy of a Software Supply-Chain Worm: A Post-Mortem Framework
500+ npm packages backdoored in days, then 796 more two months later. A repeatable post-mortem framework for self-propagating open-source worms.
Anatomy of the XZ Utils backdoor: how CVE-2024-3094 nearly compromised SSH on every major Linux distro
A CVSS 10.0 backdoor sat in xz 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 for weeks, hidden in a test file, until 0.5 seconds of extra SSH login latency gave it away.
Software supply chain attack trends: what the public incident data shows
Sonatype tracked 454,648 new malicious packages in 2025 alone — over 1.2 million total since it started counting. Here's what three years of incident data reveal.
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