In this case, the author's NPM account was taken over, email address changed to one the attacker controls, and the package was manually published.

Since the attacker had full control of the NPM account, it is game over - the attacker can login to NPM and could, if they wanted, configure Trusted Publishing on any repo they control.

Axios IS using trusted publishing, but that didn't do anything to prevent the attack since the entire NPM account was taken over and config can be modified to allow publishing using a token.

Yeah, NPM should be enforcing 2FA and likely phishing resistant 2FA for some packages/ this should be a real control, issuing public audit events for email address changes, and publish events should include information how it was published (trusted publishing, manual publish, etc).

Well, that sucks! It’ll be interesting to learn how they obtained a valid second factor or 2FA bypass; that will inform the next round of defenses here.

One wonders if Microsoft/npm.js should allow new packages to be published immediately following an account email address change? I mean changes to email address are already recognized as potential attack vectors, so emails are sent to the old address warning of potential account take over. But this seems to have been done at night, so the warning email would not be seen yet. Even so a new package could be published and served to the world immediately. Unless I misunderstand something about the facts this would indicate an extreme lack of imagination in the people at Microsoft who already went through several cycles of hardening the service against supply chain poisoning attacks.