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from the with-great-responsibility-comes-great-LOLability dept.
From Bleeping Computer
Users of popular open-source libraries 'colors' and 'faker' were left stunned after they saw their applications, using these libraries, printing gibberish data and breaking.
Some surmised if the NPM libraries had been compromised, but it turns out there's much more to the story.
The developer of these libraries intentionally introduced an infinite loop that bricked thousands of projects that depend on 'colors and 'faker'.
The colors library receives over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone, and has almost 19,000 projects depending on it. Whereas, faker receives over 2.8 million weekly downloads on npm, and has over 2,500 dependents.
But the target of this action wasn't the end user - but the big corporations...
[...] The reason behind this mischief on the developer's part appears to be retaliation—against mega-corporations and commercial consumers of open-source projects who extensively rely on cost-free and community-powered software but do not, according to the developer, give back to the community.
In November 2020, Marak had warned that he will no longer be supporting the big corporations with his "free work" and that commercial entities should consider either forking the projects or compensating the dev with a yearly "six figure" salary.
"Respectfully, I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s ( and other smaller sized companies ) with my free work. There isn't much else to say," the developer previously wrote.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Friday January 14 2022, @04:37AM (4 children)
If it didn't cause any of the tests to fail, would it go unnoticed?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday January 14 2022, @10:38AM (3 children)
Yes, but at least main workflows should be in any reasonable test setup...
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Friday January 14 2022, @02:32PM (2 children)
What I meant was that if I introduce new code that does something nefarious but doesn't brak any existing functionality, would it be detected by automated tests? Test driven development, for example, results in tests that will detect changes that break existing functionality, but it won't detect any added functionality. I'm also not sure that source code analyzers, especially static ones, pull in and verify included libraries.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday January 14 2022, @03:02PM (1 child)
True. It doesn't seem to be what is happening here (where the new code is just locking up everything downstream).
Are you suggesting bad people can get into the code base and start doing Evil things downstream by manipulating a commonly used (but poorly supported) library?
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Friday January 14 2022, @08:54PM
Yes. Either the library changes hands or a developer's account get compromised for example. Evil code gets pushed to the repository and automagically picked up by ACME's build pipeline without anyone validating the new version. Everything is code reuse these days where the first thing developers do is see if there's a library available to do whatever they need so they don't have to do it themselves. Depending on where they are working this code might come from some dodgy web site hosted who knows where.