I'm not exactly pro-AI, but even I can see that their system clearly works well in this case. If you tune the model to favour false positives, with a human review step (that's quick), I can image your response time being cut from days to hours (and your customers getting their updates that much faster).

He literally said "Flagged packages are escalated to a human review team." in the second sentence. Wtf is the problem here?

> We use a mix of static analysis and AI. Flagged packages are escalated to a human review team.

“Chat, I have reading comprehension problems. How do I fix it?”

"LLM bad"

Very insightful.

It's actually pretty easy to detect that something is obfuscated, but it's harder to prove that the obfuscated code is actually harmful. This is why we still have a team of humans review flagged packages before we try to get them taken down, otherwise you would end up with way too many false positives.

Probably. It’s trivial to plug some obfuscated code into an LLM and ask it what it does.

They're profiting off helping to solve the problem through early warning and detection. And by keeping their customers safe from stuff like this.

Seems good to me. I want more attention and more tooling around this problem. You seem mad at them for helping solve a real problem?

When we find malware on any registry (npm, rubygems, pypi or otherwise), we immediately report it to the upstream registry and try to get it taken down. This helps reduce the blast radius from incidents like this and mitigates the damage done to the entire ecosystem.

You can call it ambulance chasing, but I think this is a good thing for the whole software ecosystem if people aren't accidentally bundling cryptostealers in their web apps.

And regarding not copying massive trees of untrusted dependencies: I am actually all for this! It's better to have fewer dependencies, but this is also not how software works today. Given the imperfect world we have, I think it's better to at least try to do something to detect and block malware than just complain about npm.

> Do I need any? Automated tools cannot prevent malicious code being injected. While they can make attempts to evaluate common heuristics and will catch low hanging malware, they are not fool proof against highly targeted attacks.

So just because a lock isn't 100% effective at keeping out criminals we shouldn't lock our doors?

The more tools that exist to help find vulnerabilities, the better, as long as they're not used in a fully automated fashion. Human vetting is vital, but using tools to alert humans to such issues is a boon.