November 6, 2025
One typo from malware, one thread from meltdown
Supply chain attacks are exploiting our assumptions
Internet split: sandbox it, rewrite it, or build it yourself
TLDR: Installing code is a trust gamble: fake names, hacked authors, and poisoned builds can slip through, as the XZ backdoor scare showed. Commenters split between sandboxing everything, avoiding dependencies, and asking if moving to Rust just swaps memory bugs for supply-chain chaos—because this affects every app you use.
The story: modern coding is built on trust, and attackers are cashing in. Every "install" button can sneak in fakes, from misspelled package names to hacked build systems. Think of it like ordering from a food app and hoping the kitchen, the driver, and the box are all legit. 2024’s scares—thousands of bad packages pulled and the near-disaster XZ Utils backdoor—have the community rattled and loudly divided.
The hottest take? Isolation everything. One camp channels QubesOS-style “each thing in its own bubble,” with udev4096 calling to sandbox “every library,” as if apps should live in tiny apartments with locked doors. Another crowd is side-eyeing language wars: tharne quips that swapping C for Rust might just trade “memory bugs for supply chain drama,” a spicy point when Rust is often hailed as “safer.” Then came the minimalist rebellion: alganet’s “not made here” stance—aka build more yourself, depend on others less—got surprising cheers. And for the “can’t the computer just stop it?” crew, coolThingsFirst asked why antivirus or the operating system can’t simply block token-stealing apps by default.
Cue the gallows humor: folks joked that an underscore is now a firewall—install rust_decimal, not rustdecimal—or else. The vibe: dependency scanning isn’t enough; trust must be verified. Fewer rando packages, more sandboxes, and maybe a little paranoia.
Key Points
- •Modern software development relies on implicit trust in packages, publishers, build artifacts, and maintainers.
- •In 2024, PyPI and npm removed thousands of malicious packages; some projects had malware injected into build pipelines.
- •The XZ Utils backdoor nearly reached millions of Linux systems, underscoring systemic risk.
- •SBOMs and dependency scanning identify known vulnerabilities but do not verify provenance or build integrity.
- •A 2022 crates.io typosquatting attack used a malicious rustdecimal package mimicking rust_decimal, executing malware via Decimal::new.