NPM 'accidentally' removes Stylus package, breaks builds and pipelines

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/npm-accidentally-removes-stylus-package-breaks-builds-and-pipelines/

by daninet • 1 year ago

17 6 1 year ago

"Panya, who is one of the maintainers of the stylus package, published them, and because of that, his account was banned, and all the packages that were connected to him were yanked, including the Stylus one. So that's the story here. A big false alarm by NPM," states Abai.

These seems completely reasonable. After posting 3 malicious packages they disabled all other packages for which he was a maintainer (could push updates).

"Accidentally" doesn't really fit with my reading. Maybe Stylus is clean but this move seems completely rational.

axsharma2• 1 year ago

Why not instead remove 'panya' as a maintainer from legitimate packages that were unaffected? No recent or malicious versions of Stylus have been published (which generally is the case during a hijack) and no evidence that any were altered. Stylus is relied upon by several popular frameworks including Angular 12. Admins should have at least checked this before pressing the kill switch.

Fwiw, npm appears to be restoring access to the project https://github.com/stylus/stylus/issues/2938#issue-325479314...

Ukv• 1 year ago

Why not instead remove 'panya' as a maintainer from legitimate packages that were unaffected? No recent or malicious versions of Stylus have been published (which generally is the case during a hijack) and no evidence that any were altered.

Verifying that a package is unaffected can take some time. NPM may not know specifically when that package owner was compromised, or even if they've been a malicious actor the whole time, so the fact that there was no recent version isn't a guarantee of safety. Putting a security hold on the package in the meantime seems a reasonable approach.

Stylus is relied upon by several popular frameworks including Angular 12. Admins should have at least checked this before pressing the kill switch.

That it's frequently downloaded also makes it more pressing to block if there's a reasonable chance that it contains malware.

paradox460• 1 year ago

I really liked stylus back when. It takes what sass was trying to do to a logical conclusion.

I stopped using it because it has some issues with new CSS syntax, and the escape hatches for it are ugly and finicky

https://pdx.su/blog/2023-08-22-i-dont-use-indented-anymore/

wylie• 1 year ago

According to comments on the GitHub project, it’s been restored to NPM. https://github.com/stylus/stylus/issues/2938

NPM 'accidentally' removes Stylus package, breaks builds and pipelines

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