'Twas the night before launch, when all through the stack,
Not a function was firing, no callback sent back.
The package.json was locked with great care,
In hopes that the build server soon would be there.
The developers nestled all snug in their chairs,
With visions of IPOs soothing their cares;
And the CTO in her kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a post-sprint power nap.
When out in the pipeline there rose such a clatter,
I sshed in to see what was the matter.
Away to the console I flew like a flash,
Tore open the logs and I cleared out the cache.
The glow of the monitor on errors below
Gave a luster of dread to the objects I know,
When, what to my weary red eyes should appear,
But a supply chain attack and a dependency fear!
With a skeletal driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it wasn't St. Nick.
More rapid than ransomware his attack bot they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
"Now, Typosquat! now, Malware! now, Trojan and Worm!
On, Zero-Day! on, Backdoor! let's make the devs squirm!
To the top of the root! To the top of the wall!
Now crash away! Crash away! Crash away all!"
As dry leaves that before a hurricane fly,
When they meet with a firewall, blew to the sky,
So up to node_modules the vulnerabilities flew,
With a sleigh full of payloads, and a cryptominer too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the drive,
The prancing and pawing of scripts coming alive.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the CI/CD came Jack with a bound.
He was dressed all in patches, from head to his foot,
And his code was all tarnished with warnings and soot;
A bundle of "crates" he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a hacker exploring a crack.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to the shell,
And triggered the nightmare: Dependency Hell.
He swapped out my libraries for scripts that were fake,
And laughed as he watched the whole infrastructure break.
But just as the server was ready to crash,
A shield intercepted the malicious bash!
It moved with the speed of a high-flying rocket,
The pipeline was saved by the tool known as Socket!
It analyzed packages, checking the scope,
Restoring the build and restoring my hope.
It flagged the install scripts, the typos, the lie,
And wouldn't let one single danger go by.
Jack saw that his malware was destined to fail,
Stopped cold by the scan and security rail.
He sprang to the network, to his bots gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
I yelled at the screen as he vanished from sight—
"Socket blocked all the malware! And to all a Good Night!"
🎁🎁🎁
As the year winds down, the naughty list grows longer. They’ve already been busy sneaking malicious updates into trusted dependencies, and they don’t care about your PTO calendar. The nice list, on the other hand, is full of teams that sleep better at night with detections in place. Before the holidays roll through and attention drifts, it’s a good time to get protected. Install our free GitHub app to start catching risky changes automatically. You can also use Socket Firewall to protect your machine from malicious code long before it turns into a late-night incident.
Wishing you a calm, cozy end of year with clean builds and quiet alerts,
The Socket Team