colors.js VS Faker.js

However, it's unlikely that the majority of users actually visit GitHub at https://github.com/Marak/colors.js to review the code, even at a high level. Most developers tend to rely on the assurance that open source software is generally safe to use.

> A new feature was added to the colors.js project for generating cool ASCII Art American Flags. Unfortunately, this feature was not bug-free and some test code slipped into the release causing issues downstream. Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time.

https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/commits/master shows 4 commits and 2 releases. Does not seem like a simple mistake

> As per our internal open-source development process, I opened an Issue in colors to track the bug as soon as it was confirmed. It happened to be a weekend [...] I tagged some other open-source developers I've worked with in the past to see if they had time to assist and closed the browser tab.

Early this month, the malicious attack on free-to-use libraries, namely color.js and faker.js, created a real uproar in the development community. These tools are used in thousands of projects and their downloading rate from npm is estimated in millions per week. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be an inside job. Marak Squires, the creator of these libraries, intentionally committed malicious code to his projects and published updated codebases on GitHub and npm. It is said that this sabotage was caused by unsuccessful attempts of Mr. Squires to monetize his projects. Fortunately, malicious packages were quickly removed and the attacker’s account was suspended. The story sparked a new wave of discussion in the development community on possible steps to make the development and maintenance of open-source projects more sustainable.

See: https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/issues/285

Ever used colors.js? How about the same in dart?

Early this month, the malicious attack on free-to-use libraries, namely color.js and faker.js, created a real uproar in the development community. These tools are used in thousands of projects and their downloading rate from npm is estimated in millions per week. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be an inside job. Marak Squires, the creator of these libraries, intentionally committed malicious code to his projects and published updated codebases on GitHub and npm. It is said that this sabotage was caused by unsuccessful attempts of Mr. Squires to monetize his projects. Fortunately, malicious packages were quickly removed and the attacker’s account was suspended. The story sparked a new wave of discussion in the development community on possible steps to make the development and maintenance of open-source projects more sustainable.

For anyone else curious about the allusion to Aaron Swartz, it can be found here and reads (as of posting):

Sorry little boy--- I needed to update my LinkedIn profile, hire a professional to write my resume and photograph me, and work on an open-source project no one will use (or worse- work on something everyone uses)"

So people, I've been reading the news regarding some great packages on GitHub, like the Colors and the Faker. I understand that this isn't related entirely with the linux community, but it is something that we should pay attention.

A developer appears to have purposefully corrupted a pair of open-source libraries on GitHub and software registry npm — “faker.js” and “colors.js” — that thousands of users depend on, rendering any project that contains these libraries useless, as reported by Bleeping Computer.

I mean he also maliciously changed all of the links on a faker.js issue to point to conspiracy theories (which I am pretty sure is against Github's TOS): https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/pull/2

About Four (4) Days Ago, the Author of Fakerjs a popular JavaScript library with more than 2 million weekly Download from NPM Deleted the repository and replaced it with one that only has the modified ReadMe "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?" and no content, and pushed an empty package to npm as the latest version (6.6.6).