The Bitwarden security team identified and contained a malicious package that was briefly distributed through the npm delivery path for @bitwarden/
[email protected] between 5:57 PM and 7:30 PM (ET) on April 22, 2026, in connection with a broader Checkmarx supply chain incident. The investigation found no evidence that end user vault data was accessed or at risk, or that production data or production systems were compromised. Once the issue was detected, compromised access was revoked, the malicious ...
Can we stop using npm now?
I swear to god the number of attacks like this or spawned from other attacks like this is fucking stupid. I’ve gender seen anything like it.
Genuine question. How is NPM more vulnerable than other repos? Haven’t similar supply chain attacks succeeded at least as well as this one through GitHub itself and even Linux package repos?
Part of the problem is also how many packages people bring in, even for the simplest of things.
I don’t think you’ll find another major repo with so many real-world incidents though. Whether this is because of a systemic problem or just because it’s targeted more frequently, I’m not sure.
As much as some people deride it Javascript is one of the most used languages on the planet.
This is basically the same as people thinking windows is less secure because it’s more often targeted.
JavaScript does have a bit of a problem with dependencies but it isn’t much different than other languages with built in package managers like rust. It’s just a bigger juicer target.
There’s a lot of features that make it a better package manager but nobody cares. Every project has hundreds of dependencies and packages use a minimum, not exact, version.
That sounds more like bad practices from the community. It definitely has ways to use exact versions. Not the least of which the lock file. Or the shrinkwrap file which public packages should be using.
This problem has nothing to do with NPM. Checkmarx was compromised last month, and during that compromise there were malicious VS Code extensions published to Visual Studio Code Marketplace. A Bitwarden developer says that somebody ran one of those malicious extensions, and GitHub API keys were stolen which were used in publishing the malicious CLI package.
It’s probably better that it happened on NPM. If the CLI were only downloadable from the Bitwarden website, it would have likely taken longer for somebody to notice something was wrong.
What a fucking asanine series of events.
Yes, but NPM has been had countless security problems, this isn’t a new problem. Even tho this instance is not a problem of NPM itself, it still has been proven as one of the most unreliable and insecure package managers out there.
I’m not a particular fan of npm, but you’ll probably see this kind of thing with any package manager of similar size. More a matter of what’s the most attractive target than the package tech itself.