The insider perspective on the event-stream compromise (Interview)

Adam and Jerod talk with Dominic Tarr, creator of event-stream, the IO library that made recent news as the latest malicious package in the npm registry. event-stream was turned malware, designed to target a very specific development environment and harvest account details and private keys from Bitcoin accounts.

They talk through Dominic’s backstory as a prolific contributor to open source, his stance on this package, his work in open source, the sequence of events around the hack, how we can and should handle maintainer-ship of open source infrastructure over the full life-cycle of the code’s usefulness, and what some best practices are for moving forward from this kind of attack.

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Featuring:

• Dominic Tarr – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• The issue that kicked off everything
• We covered the incident on Changelog News
• Here’s Dominic’s statement that we reference repeatedly
• Felix Krause had some on-point commentary on Twitter
• TideLift says event-stream gets 2 million downloads per week
• SwiftOnSecurity also chimed in on Twitter
• Learn more about Project Xanadu
• We discussed Reproducible Builds with Chris Lamb back in the day
• Also check out A call for kindness in open source with Brett Cannon

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!