Update to Popular NPM Package Deletes Files to Protest Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Ax Sharma, writing for Bleeping Computer:

This month, the developer behind the popular npm package ‘node-ipc’ released sabotaged versions of the library in protest of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. Newer versions of the ‘node-ipc’ package began deleting all data and overwriting all files on developer’s machines, in addition to creating new text files with “peace” messages. [...]

Popular JavaScript front end framework ‘Vue.js’ also uses ‘node-ipc’ as a dependency. But prior to this incident, ‘Vue.js’ did not pin the versions of ‘node-ipc’ dependency to a safe version and was set up to fetch the latest minor and patch versions instead [...]

The way the Node community works, just blindly slurping in other people’s package updates without knowing what’s in them, continues to boggle my mind.

★ Sunday, 20 March 2022