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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Bun-compiled JS binaries as PyPI credential stealers
Two lightning releases fetched the Bun runtime at import time to run an 11MB obfuscated JS stealer — PyPI's Python trust model didn't expect a JS binary.
How Malicious Skills Get Distributed Through Agent Registries
CVE-2025-59536 (CVSS 8.7) let a single malicious commit auto-approve MCP servers in Claude Code, no install click required. Registries need the same controls as package managers.
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