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 Once the issue was detected, compromised access was revoked, the malicious ...
Npm probably has the biggest attack surface and many of the libraries hosted there are in extremely widespread use. They’ve taken some steps to mitigate these supply chain attacks, but as we’ve seen with more recent examples, it’s unrealistic to think they can be prevented completely. Most of these attacks use stolen developer credentials, which invalidates almost all potential security measures on the registry side and the best you can hope for is catching a malicious package quickly. To be clear: I think the JS ecosystem is uniquely positioned to be the prime target of supply chain attacks and while that doesn’t excuse the slow implementation of security measures from the npm team, the people arguing that other package managers and registries aren’t vulnerable to this have to be huffing fumes.
That’s fair, I won’t pretend pypi/pip and running uvx is much safer than npx.
But why hasn’t JavaScript established a defacto stdlib to replace ask the left pads and is even type packages?
I’ve taken a near zero dependency policy on my personal projects regardless, and now I run most code in containers to sandbox it.
If you’re asking why there isn’t one shipped with JS, the answer is because JS is built for the web, and the “don’t break the web” rule makes changing things in JS hard, as well as browser devs pushing back hard on anything that increases install size.
If you’re asking why as a community, we haven’t agreed on a single package to be a stdlib - lodash.
I’m guessing things were working out pretty alright, even with the insane amount of dependencies per project. The awareness and the increasing frequency of supply chain attacks is relatively recent for npm. But who knows, maybe the tech giants in control of the web standards are happy to keep using their own vendored registries.