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bmandaletoday at 5:33 AM0 repliesview on HN

Some people would set up tooling to look for compromises the moment they get published. What's neat about this is that as an attacker you have no way to determine beforehand whether you'll get caught by this. So you would run your attack, it would lead to a compromised package being published, then the world would get a chance to look at it and see if they can detect the issue with it. This would of course lead to attackers being a lot sneakier. But I think due to the opaque nature of what checks people are running against packages and what they might notice, a much smaller number of attacks would make it through. Of course the ones that did by definition would be the ones that were impossible to detect and would thus stick around a lot longer.