I wonder who actually discovered this attack? Can we credit them? The phrasing in these posts is interesting, with some taking direct credit and others just acknowledging the incident.

Aikido says: > We were alerted to a large-scale attack against npm...

Socket says: > Socket.dev found compromised various CrowdStrike npm packages...

Ox says: > Attackers slipped malicious code into new releases...

Safety says: > The Safety research team has identified an attack on the NPM ecosystem...

Phoenix says: > Another supply chain and NPM maintainer compromised...

Semgrep says: > We are aware of a number of compromised npm packages

Mackenzie here I work for Aikido. This is a classic example of the security community all playing a part. The very first notice of this was from a developer named Daniel Pereira. He alerted Socket who did the first review of the Malware and discovered 40 packages. After, Aikido discovered an additional 147 packages and the Crowdstrike packages. I'm not sure how Step found it but they were the first to really understand the malware and that it was a self replicating worm. So multiple parties all playing a part kinda independent. Its pretty cool

Several individual developers seem to have noticed it at around the same time with Step and Socket pointing to different people in their blogs.

And then vendors from Socket, Aikido, and Step all seem to have detected it via their upstream malware detection feeds - Socket and Aikido do AI code analysis, and Step does eBPF monitoring of build pipelines. I think this was widespread enough it was noticed by several people.

Since so many vendors discovered these packages seemingly independently, you'd think that they would share those mechanisms with NPM itself so that those packages would never be published in the first place. But I guess that removes their ability to sell an "early alert" mechanism through their offerings...

OP article says: > The incident was discovered by @franky47, who promptly notified the community through a GitHub issue.

Usually security companies monitor CVEs and the security mailing lists. That's how they all end up releasing the blog posts at the same time. It's because they are all using the same primary source.