> Update — August 4, 2026, 13:37 CEST: At least 868 packages (across 1381 versions) have been compromised by the worm, with a combined total of over 2 billion monthly installs at the time of writing.

This is such lazy or click baiting writing. Who cares how many installations there are per month normally? The high install numbers are almost certainly from running in CI where such secrets don’t exist. How many installs actually occur in a non CI environment and of those how many were the compromised version?

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insanitybit 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> almost certainly from running in CI where such secrets don’t exist.

CI usually has the most privileged secrets anywhere in a company lol

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TeMPOraL an hour ago | parent [-]

CIs having per-package installs : version ratio > 1 are fundamentally dumb idea in the first place.

In a way, this teaches us that there is something as too much reliability in an ecosystem. Specifically, Github is apparently reliable enough that its occasional outages are insufficient to kill all the companies running these dumb CI setups that redownload packages from the Internet every build - so there's no incentive to reduce waste and improve security globally.

	▲	rcxdude 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Redownloading and automatically updating to the new version are pretty orthogonal. You can have a solution which caches the packages but would still update to a new version or a solution which redownloads the (verifiably) same package each time. Vendoring libraries stops both but it's the automatic updates which are the biggest risk factor.