How does one avoid malware in npm specifically?

Makes me not want to use the ecosystem, which isn’t always possible.

This attack is pretty bad, but as shown by the tiny ROI for the attacker mentioned in this article (about $500 so far: https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/entity/61fbc095-f19b-479d-a0...) this really isn't quite as ecosystem-catastrophic as it sounds, for a few reasons:

* Major attacks on large packages like this are caught fairly quickly - a few hours in this case - making the vulnerable window _relatively_ small.

* NPM locks installed dependencies by default, against both the version & a hash of the content, so you'll only install the new malicious version if you happen to be adding or updating this dependency specifically within the window this version is still live. It's effectively sort-of TOFU. If even you ran `npm install` in a project already using this dependency in the specific window it was live, you will not normally install the malicious version.

* There's quite a few tools to help mitigate the risk here, like https://socket.dev and npq (https://github.com/lirantal/npq).

As one datapoint, look at the download stats for the affected Chalk package for example (https://www.npmjs.com/package/chalk?activeTab=versions) - the vast majority of installs were not installing the latest version anyway.

There are caveats to this: e.g. you can use npm without a lockfile, in which case a fresh local install can pull down unexpected versions, or you could be manually updating/adding a different package which happens to depend on an affected package (which might trigger a lockfile update, which might then fetch the latest version of the subdependency) during the vulnerable window, or of course it's totally possible you might install the package for the first time at the precisely wrong moment, etc etc.

This is definitely bad, and could have been extremely disastrous if it wasn't caught. But in practice, npm & the ecosystem have put in quite a few protections that do help to _mostly_ mitigate these kind of risks in typical use cases (but not completely, and there's definitely plenty more work to do!) and it's certainly not the case that millions of JS developers & projects were all catastrophically pwned today.

'npm install' and 'pip install' can both run scripts on your computer. Both ecosystems have this risk and loose monitoring, so there are days where packages are messed up. I don't think you can avoid malware by picking one over the other.

>Makes me not want to use the ecosystem

I came to that conclusion long ago.