alt Hacker News>If everyone starts applying cooldowns, won't it postpone the problem?
There are still research firms who are actively and aggressively scanning new packages once they are pushed. For example socket.dev pulls new packages across ecosystems and performs automated analysis and runs it in a sandbox. We don't have to have them go boom in someone's production repos to find out there is a problem.
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NewJazz • today at 12:07 AM
Also as an upstream, if your "coworker" releases a strange package without discussing the changes with the broader maintenance group, you might notice after 3-48 hours, but probably not within the hour unless you happened to be online.
And if every malware developer worth their salt now introduces code to "wait out" that period of time, we're back to square one.
This assumes that they employ clandestine enough techniques that you have to actually install, wait and observe the behavior for longer than the cooldown period in order to detect this, because the code is "obfuscated" enough to evade static analysis of the code. It's anti-virus / anti-anti-virus 101 all over so to speak.
The good thing I suppose is that it raises the bar. Your regular "virus generator" script kid (sorry: supply chain attack generator script kid) can no longer pull this off.