#open-source

A copy of Postmark's MCP server, published to npm by someone unaffiliated with them, worked perfectly for fifteen versions. The sixteenth added one line — a BCC to an address the publisher controlled.

The malicious release carried valid SLSA provenance and passed every integrity check, because the honest build pipeline compiled source that was already poisoned. It also ran when a developer merely opened the folder.

Nobody was hacked. A Chinese CDN company bought the polyfill.io domain, and every site that had ever pasted the script tag started serving whatever the new owner wanted. Four months later it was redirecting phones to betting scams.

A stranger emailed an unpaid maintainer offering to take over a package he no longer used. Three months later it was stealing private keys from bitcoin wallets holding more than 100 BTC. Nobody was ever identified.

A sophisticated multi-year supply chain attack compromised the widely used xz compression library, embedding a backdoor in liblzma that targeted OpenSSH authentication on systemd-based Linux distributions. The attacker, operating under the persona 'Jia Tan,' spent over two years building trust as a contributor before gaining maintainership and inserting the malicious code.