Kate Holterhoff sits down with Jack Herrington, Principal Software Engineer at Netlify and maintainer of TanStack AI, to walk the May 2026 TanStack npm supply-chain compromise. They discuss the incident in depth, including the risk of chained attacks, the role of GitHub Actions, what we know about the hackers and mini shai-hulud. Jack also weighs in on why developers are becoming more security aware and why the supply chain and CI/CD is more important than ever in the AI era.

Links

• LinkedIn: Jack Herrington
• Sarah Gerrard, Corbin Crutchley, Jack Herrington, Tanner Linsley, Florian Pellet, and Harry Whorlow, “Hardening TanStack After the npm Compromise,” TanStack Blog, 12 May 2026.
• Tanner Linsley, “Postmortem: TanStack npm supply-chain compromise,” TanStack Blog, 11 May 2026.
• “Guarding the JavaScript Supply Chain: Preventing NPM Attacks with Feross Aboukhadijeh – JSJ 695,” Javascript Jabber, 14 November 2025.
• Kate Holterhoff, “The Generative AI Policy Landscape in Open Source,” RedMonk’s Blog, 26 February 2026.
• visualhaggard.org

Transcript

Kate Holterhoff (00:04)
my name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at RedMonk, and my guest is Jack Herrington He’s a principal software engineer at Netlify. He’s the co-host of Frontend Fire. He’s a YouTuber and a TanStack AI maintainer. So jazzed to have you on the show today. Jack, how are you doing?

Jack Herrington (00:21)
Doing great, actually. I’m got a little bit of a cold. So if you hear like the nasal thing, I don’t know. I didn’t get it from Microsoft Build. I know we were together at Microsoft Build. I don’t get it, I didn’t get it from there. My boss, who also lives locally, was like, you know, you you she her kids got it. So I’m like, and it was funny too, because my wife was like, You got it at Microsoft Build, and then you gave it me. I’m like, no, no, no. Local. Local. Yeah. It’s not that bad. It’s just like, you know, just like a little thing in the back of the throat.

Kate Holterhoff (00:25)
yeah.

Okay.

It’s going around. man.

It’s a local cold. Okay. This is good to know. I know. This

yeah. No, no, I think it’s going around right now ’cause my four year old he’s got the sniffles too. It’s a summer cold. All right, well I am thinking all the

Jack Herrington (00:50)
If I sound weird. Yeah.

I hate summer if summer

cool is the worst. Okay, yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (00:59)
I will be thinking salubrious thoughts for you and and that your wife doesn’t succumb to whatever you brought home from wherever. Yes. Well, yes, you’re welcome. all right. So yes, as as Jack sort of intimated, I we met at Microsoft Build. so jazzed to have him on here. I am a longtime

Jack Herrington (01:02)
thank you.

That is the biggest word I’ll hear all day, salubrious. Well done.

Kate Holterhoff (01:23)
Listener, a Front End Fire, super fan, if you will, and according to to Jack I nerd sniped him, which cracks me up I I showed

Jack Herrington (01:30)
You did.

I gotta say, because your data set was so

cool. I am a sucker for cool data sets. And Kate has this awesome site called the Visual Haggard. And the idea is that it’s a resource for information about what’s what’s the first name again? So it’s a great name. H. Rider Haggard. Like that that that name alone is awesome. But yeah, it’s amazing. Of course, you have to have a name like that. When you’re gonna write basically the Indiana Jones slash Alan Quatermain books and

Kate Holterhoff (01:48)
H. Rider Haggard. Yes, it is. I know. It’s heavy. I agreed. Yeah.

Jack Herrington (02:02)
She’s got all these pictures in there and it was all cataloged and stuff. And and you know, she’s like, Yeah, what what can el what else can we do with this? And of course, like I just you know, I I skipped out on the the night’s events and then just went back to the hotel and just like just went hog wild on this thing, which is so much fun. It was just such a great I loved great I love great data sets.

Kate Holterhoff (02:19)
Aww.

Aw, well, I it for those of you just listening to this on what with just with your headphones, just know that I am blushing right now. This is so sweet. Yes, no, this is very nice of you. yes, the Visual Haggard is a labor of loved, begun it in twenty thirteen, spent forever on it. It was one of my academic projects, and I still maintain it. I was able to vibe code it back up, Ruby on Rails app. and and yeah, Jack was able to to like

Jack Herrington (02:30)
No

Kate Holterhoff (02:47)
Completely reinvented using TanStack AI. So super jazzed, we’re gonna have that coming out here soon. not why he’s here to talk, although

Jack Herrington (02:52)
That’s a fun thing by the way. If you’re if

if you are

into that sort of like just ha having a pet project like that that you you take from technology to technology to technology is actually really cool. I I have a thing called fret navigator that I I have taken all the way from like Mac OS version three all the way through to I’m implementing it now using AI and yada yada yada. And it’s a thing about like finding chords and scales on on fretboards. But nowadays it’s much more about like b automatically generating songs and stuff like that. So

Kate Holterhoff (03:25)
That

is so cool. I love talking to technologists who are musicians. Like that is you know, such a good what synthesis of of skill sets there. So that that’s really cool. yeah, so so if you haven’t

Jack Herrington (03:25)
Yeah. Yeah.

funny, I wouldn’t say that I’m

a musician because like the reason I got into it in the first place is I I was really bad at guitar, but I was really good at the math behind guitar. And so recently I just actually started like learning guitar. I would get a guitar teacher now, and I would actually start saying that I’m almost a musician. Like it’s close, you know, like I can almost start saying I actually know how to play guitar. So yeah. Yeah, I know.

Kate Holterhoff (03:58)
Yeah.

I don’t gate keep terms like that. My goodness. This is hey, you’re

a musician, Jack. I I I said it. So, all right. Just own it. Yeah. You can collab. Yeah. That’s right. I know. I got the triangle. I’m a musician. Just you know, everyone step back. Okay. all right. But hey, we let’s let’s talk about the thing. Okay, so we are here to talk about this is actually gonna be kind of a downer after after this intro here, but it’s good. Okay.

Jack Herrington (04:06)
There you go. Okay. I can clap. Just own it. Own it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Let’s talk about the thing.

No, it’s cool. It’s like it’s very interesting from like

a a a a vulnerability standpoint. What should you do? How do you all that? So yeah, let’s talk about the the node ecosystem and how TanStack got hacked.

Kate Holterhoff (04:33)
Yeah Yeah? Yeah, okay. Let’s let’s do

how TanStack got hacked. Okay, so TanStack I l I mean let’s just start the beginning here, because I suspect many folks don’t even know what TanStack is. So but yes, it’s been in the news. So folks maybe who’ve never heard of it beforehand, who aren’t in the front end space, were probably like, what the heck is TanStack and why is it being associated with Mistral and OpenAI and all of these things? So first off, what the heck is TanStack?

Jack Herrington (05:04)
What the heck TanStack? So TanStack is a it is a set of libraries, like an ecosystem of related libraries that kind of patch holes in the React ecosystem. And it started off with React query back in the day. Actually, it started off with React table. And Tan so Tanner Linsley, who is the guy behind TanStack,

Kate Holterhoff (05:15)
Okay.

Jack Herrington (05:24)
There’s whole story about that name, but it created this thing called React Table, which was basically just how to to maintain tables well in React. It’s a thing sorting and filtering and all that stuff, right? And so it’s a pain. And so the idea was, you know, you bring in this library, this headless library, you handle all the UI, the look and the look and feel of it, but it handles all the kind of crunchy logic. And so that’s kind of the vibe behind like basically every TanStack package, is you know, we kind of

Like handle the grunt work for you so that you can concentrate on the cool stuff. And so it kind of blossomed. So React Table, then React Query, which became like I think it’s it’s crazy, it’s installed on like 30% of all React apps is React Query. I mean everybody uses it. And so what happened was as we started to kind of build out the ecosystem.

We needed a new banner for it. So it was like TanStack and it wasn’t particularly React because you know we now we handle solid and view and all the rest. And then I came in, I guess, two years ago. I was like tired of doing just the YouTube thing. So I wanted to do some open source as well. And I was like, Tanner, can I join up? And he’s like, Yeah, yeah. And so I I started off just doing documentation, then I started working on Tansa TanStack Router and TanStack Start, which is where our

Kate Holterhoff (06:26)
Yeah.

Jack Herrington (06:45)
lovely security issue came in. And then just around like React

Conf 2025. I was like, hey, Tanner, we need an AI library. Like, you know, we need to like get into that space. And so I have a friend of mine and I started off this AI library, and it’s been doing well too. So we’re really excited about it. But it the ecosystem is now, I think, 17 different packages. I just did a video on this where I took all 17 and put them into a single app, and it actually worked out. It’s it’s no big deal. And and and it was funny too because just

Kate Holterhoff (07:11)
Wow.

Amazing. Yeah.

Jack Herrington (07:21)
Using TanStack AI as opposed to the Vercel AI SDK was like a savings like 740 K of dependencies. I was like, dang, that’s that’s cool. Like happy about that. So yeah, no, it’s a it’s a it’s a a an ecosystem of helpful libraries for like

Kate Holterhoff (07:33)
That’s reasonable. Yeah, that’s good.

Jack Herrington (07:42)
JavaScript, TypeScript developers, primarily we know we’re huge into TypeScript, huge into typing, but it’s not framework specific per se. It’s like it works on, as I say, like React, Vue, Solid, Svelte, you know, all a lot of different stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (07:56)
Okay, okay.

all right, so that’s TanStack. You came in two years ago. how many folks are like kind of consistent maintainers in the way that you are?

Jack Herrington (08:00)
That’s TanStack.

Every project has a champion. So how big’s a team? So you ki I yeah, kinda in that space. You know, like you know, like some some people are overlooked, you know, multiple projects, like I think yeah. So generally in that I would say fifteen, twenty space, but it you know, it it has kind of ki brought together a lot of amazing talent. Like yeah, I I

Kate Holterhoff (08:10)
Okay, so seventeen.

Okay.

Yeah.

Jack Herrington (08:37)
I just love that about it, ’cause yeah, talking about how y you want to be happy in software engineering and it’s all about being on a really good team. Well, this is a really good team. Like these guys know what they’re doing and it’s great. It’s great to see.

Kate Holterhoff (08:39)
Yeah.

Yes, right. that’s awesome.

That’s amazing. Yeah. I mean I’ve met Tanner and he is great, so I can imagine he would he would draw a very charismatic group of folks around him, such as yourself. so this is exciting. So we’ve got this great group of folks, passionate, building something cool, and then why don’t you give us the lowdown on what actually happened?

Jack Herrington (08:55)
yeah.

And then they get hacked.

Yeah, so what happened was that I guess somebody glommed on the idea that like TanStack Router / Start, which is our variant of basically Next.js. So if you are thinking about like Next.js, there is a viable alternative, and that is TanStack Start. And a lot of companies are starting to move over to that. It handles, you know, server-side rendering and server functions and all the stuff that you’d need to build a modern web app. I built your Visual Haggard, rebuilt built rebuilt it on that.

Kate Holterhoff (09:40)
Yeah.

Okay.

Jack Herrington (09:42)
And so it’s getting a lot of play. It’s getting a lot of installs, in particular TanStack Router. so what the hackers found was that they were we had a vulner kind of a vulnerability in the way that we over cached.

to make CI/CD more efficient. I mean if you if you’re doing GitHub Actions and all that, you wanna make sure that they’re quick, right? And so what we do is from iteration to iteration, we tend to cache stuff, including the node modules, which are a huge thing to download. And that

Kate Holterhoff (10:14)
Mm.

Jack Herrington (10:16)
basically opened us up to having our cache poisoned by somebody who basically forked us and reused our cache and was able to poison our cache such that when Manuel, who’s the the author on TanStack Router and TanStack Start, did a

actual push like a a a good push of of stuff he actually pulled in these this poisoned package which then when run basic so it injected itself into like Router Start so when you started your application it would actually go and then try and mine secrets off of your machine and that packet those packages were alive for about three to four hours and there were some downloads and it is essentially a what they call a

Kate Holterhoff (10:39)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Herrington (11:07)
Mini Shai-Hulud attack. So that’s kind of fun. So basically a self-replicating worm, right? Once it gets on your machine, it then tries to go and exploit other machines given your, you know, MTM tokens to try and republish packages and all that kind of stuff. so that’s what that’s what it’s trying to do. And so it was it was alive for three to four hours. Our unit test picked it up, we picked it up pretty quickly.

Kate Holterhoff (11:10)
Right.

Ooh.

Jack Herrington (11:33)
And we’re able to bring down all of the packages that were infected and then go and later on change our our bill procedures so that we no longer did this kind of aggressive caching of artifacts.

That basically exposed us to this. But it was an incredibly sophisticated attack, which is I think, yeah, in in hindsight. Do you know and at the time even at the time we were looking at like this is this is not like your average attack. This was like somebody who who spent a lot of time looking at our build system, which is itself open source, and then probably with something like Claude and like going through and saying, like, how can I go and attack this? Or we maybe I am the main.

Kate Holterhoff (11:53)
Yeah.

Jack Herrington (12:17)
maintainer of this project, like tell me how it could be attacked, right? Or something like that. And then architecting a a very, very sophisticated attack. I mean he they actually had to like like predict tokens. I mean it was it was an incredibly sophisticated attack. I we were impressed by it. And it didn’t really which is funny because it didn’t really have

Kate Holterhoff (12:22)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jack Herrington (12:40)
a huge impact, I would say, you know. it wasn’t like the craziest thing. And then a couple of days later, I can’t remember probably Vercel or whatever got yet another hack and and it was out of the news almost right Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (12:54)
Right. Yeah.

Okay. And so has anyone who has was hacked reached out to you and been like, I had to burn my laptop or whatever? Yeah. Okay.

Jack Herrington (13:04)
No, no. Although that is a thing.

by the way, so it’s Team PCP was the original folks behind it. The campaign dubbed Mini Shai-Hulud. Yeah. Lovely.

Kate Holterhoff (13:10)
Okay, those are the hackers.

man. What do we know about

them? Anything? Like geographically, motives? Like they just want to see the world burn?

Jack Herrington (13:20)
Same group tied to Trivi,

the Aqua Security hack and bit the Bitwarden CLI attack, which is kind of a bummer because I I don’t use Bitwarden, but I so I use one password, but I my I I know Paige used Bitwarden, so that was a big deal. yeah, I don’t know. You use a password manager, right? Please tell me you didn’t. Yeah, good. Okay. Yeah. Why wouldn’t you? Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (13:25)
Okay, yeah.

Yeah.

Ooh yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. God, yes. Why yeah, I

mean, come on, I can’t remember all those things. okay. So these are old hat in terms of like they’re hacking everything. so these folks are experts and they happen to get you in their Shai-Hulud sort of umbrella of of all these different hacks, these different worm attacks. You you were the first. Wow.

Jack Herrington (13:46)
Right.

Well we were the entry point. It was specifically targeted at TanStack Router. And then in

yeah, and then from there it was going to yeah, it that was gonna go and infect other people’s machines, and w after which it was gonna then gonna go and you know and you know try to go and publish packages where so the basic idea is

Kate Holterhoff (14:10)
Flattering.

Jack Herrington (14:25)
You get onto the the this Shai-Hulud worm gets onto my machine. I am a developer. I have GitHub tokens or network npm tokens and packages. And now I’m gonna it’s gonna go then and try and infect those packages and keep on going. Which kind of seems a little edgy to me, to be honest. Like that is a very small attack vector. But I guess it’s I guess it’s worth your time. I you know, as a as a hacker, I don’t really know.

Kate Holterhoff (14:41)
Mm.

I don’t either. I know. Because for a while they were doing like bit bitcoining, you know, bitcoin mining. That was the the idea, right? But now we’re just stealing secrets. Just you know. That’s the thing. And you can’t even just delete these things. I mean, I guess. I yeah, I I don’t know. This I mean, let me ask you this, Jack. What’s your experience with security before this? I mean I think of you as a you know, a front-endy guy. Like now you’re what? you got your you’re going to DEF CON, like you got your security hat on?

Jack Herrington (14:54)
Yeah. And they’re not it’s like a credential thing.

Right. Yeah.

Which is like AI mining?

Ha ha.

no.

Dude, no. I I don’t I don’t want to go to DEF CON. I don’t want to go to DEF CON because I know that like people that go to DEF CON like their phones get hacked and stuff like that. And I I would say I kind of like an a security kind of light guy personally. You know, I mean

Kate Holterhoff (15:24)
OWASP, you got all the OWASP memorized? Okay.

Ha ha

Mm.

Security light. Okay, sure.

Jack Herrington (15:42)
practical security. I do use a password manager. And then for Netlify, obviously I don’t the cool thing about Netlify is personally I don’t actually have access to a bunch of the secrets. So they could get me, but it doesn’t really make it it doesn’t help them, you know. it’s not like we give out secrets to everybody for production. You know, it’s a it’s a small set. so that’s good. but actually I do have a little bit of

Kate Holterhoff (15:44)
Yeah. R well, yes.

good. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. Okay.

Jack Herrington (16:09)
front end security stuff. I was I worked at a company called Fortify, which got acquired by HPE. And that was doing like back in the day, static security analysis of applications. And then all got into penetration testing. But I think a lot of that is kind of just old I guess old hat. I mean nowadays you just got, you know, Mythos and Claude. They can help you find, you know, security vulnerabilities. And

Kate Holterhoff (16:36)
Yeah.

Jack Herrington (16:37)
Yeah. Well it’s a weird world. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (16:38)
I’ve heard it on good authority that pen testing is dead. So they didn’t say it like that. I said that. But it’s it seems like if you I mean it it was Tanya Janca she came on the podcast to talk to me about this. She’s she’s a a real expert in this and she was like, If you see yourself in a career in pen testing, maybe rethink your career choices. Like this is now now is the time to leave. This is you know, become

Jack Herrington (16:55)
Get out.

Kate Holterhoff (17:02)
Upskill, you know, this is not gonna be a thing. yeah. same thing with like bug bounties, just they’re all shutting down. yeah. Absolutely. It’s not a good time to be Well, I don’t know. I mean maybe it is is a great time because we have to think outside the box. This is like the br you know, the w the Wild West, a brave new world, whatever metaphor you want to use to try to figure out what’s I don’t know, what’s going on. so so yeah.

Jack Herrington (17:05)
Yeah, right. Because AI is basically just gonna like just hammer, you know, your site. Yeah. Yeah.

Well that’s the thing. I’ve been doing this this big gig as as a I’ve been coding since I was thirteen years old and I’m an old dude. So yeah. And so I’ve seen a few things. but what it what I can tell you is you it’s the it’s the usual it it’s the the constant is change, right? And so in your career, you can’t just stick on one technology because if you do

Kate Holterhoff (17:34)
My goodness.

You’ve seen a few things.

Jack Herrington (17:52)
It’s gonna be gone. Like I I spent years in like C and C++ and then I moved over to Python and Ruby and Node and you know, you you just you kind of take those basic core principles of building apps for people and then you just take them to whatever you know technologies are the technologies of the day. And and don’t say things like, In my day, you know, we used to I’ve seen this pattern before, because that’ll make you sound old or very ageist. But but

Kate Holterhoff (17:56)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jack Herrington (18:21)
but you know, we were talking about before, right? You’re with Visual Haggard, with with Fret Navigator, you go and you kind of take this, you know, you you try out new technologies with new you know things, and it’s like, wow, this is cool. And I and I gotta say, the people will always ask me, like, why are you in this for so long? And it’s always like, there’s always something. You know, there’s always something new. And the new now is obviously AI. And I’m just enthralled. I mean, I love it. I just love it.

Kate Holterhoff (18:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jack Herrington (18:47)
I know it’s

Kate Holterhoff (18:48)
yeah.

Jack Herrington (18:48)
like the water or in the data centers and yada yada yada, there’s all that, but like I love the potential of it.

Kate Holterhoff (18:50)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m right there with you. I self identify as a vibe analyst these days, so I’m I’m all in. This is, you know, you were in good company. so this is interesting though. So you have a bit of experience with security. This wasn’t like all new. I wanna hear about the behind the scenes situation at TanStack when you discovered that this incident had occurred because you wrote one of the post mortems. Like you’re one of the co authors on that. and so, you know, you must have been close to it.

Jack Herrington (19:26)
I was mm, I wasn’t super close to it. I yeah, I am Yeah actually, yes. you know, my my thing was well, I started off on that. but one of the things is like I I’m kind of one of the front faces of of TanStack, trying to make it more accessible for folks, trying to communicate about it. And so, you know, my thing was coming in and making sure that we were telling people like what to do now.

Kate Holterhoff (19:28)
You just volunteered to write. All right. I get it. Yeah. That was good. You said you did documentation, so

sure.

Jack Herrington (19:53)
Like we’ve add this hack, you know, what do you do? And you know, there were some basic pieces of advice around like with you know use a package manager where you can set a minimum age on packages. That was is the big win. The interesting thing about this particular hack though is that it didn’t require this post-install step that a lot of these hacks do, which is that you

Kate Holterhoff (19:53)
Yeah.

Okay.

Hmm. Interesting,

Jack Herrington (20:19)
You install

Kate Holterhoff (20:19)
yeah.

Jack Herrington (20:20)
this package and that package in turn runs some code after it, like presumably to do things like a a native compile or whatever. and that would be the valid use. That is not the case here. This is actually injecting code into your app, and then your app is the one that actually does the exploit, which is

Kate Holterhoff (20:28)
Uh-huh.

Jack Herrington (20:40)
Pretty intense, I gotta say. So that that was pretty interesting all on its own. yeah, we were we were given a a heads up by a security company, I can’t remember which one exactly. And then that stopped us in our tracks and yeah, so we started the the process of making sure that with npm that we we had we were able to bring all the packages that were exploited down and then start crawling through what actually happened and and quickly like, you know, getting rid of the caching stuff. Because that that’s one of the cool things about this kind of thing is like

Kate Holterhoff (21:05)
Wow.

Jack Herrington (21:10)
You know, caching is something you kind of bring in later as a performance optimization. So sometimes it’s easy to like just pull it back out again. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (21:17)
Mm. Okay.

interesting. Can you share which security company it was that reached out to you or are they do they want to remain anonymous?

Jack Herrington (21:27)
Yeah, I I’ll have to go take a look at that ’cause I I do Yeah. No, sorry.

Kate Holterhoff (21:30)
Okay. That’s fine.

Yeah, no, that’s okay. so that’s interesting then. So d do you know like for other observability or like maybe even for like fancy enterprise software, do they typically have like observability that would have alerted them to this ahead of time so that you wouldn’t have needed a third party? And is that something like you’re implementing now?

Jack Herrington (21:51)
Well, as I say, like the the this also triggered our unit tests. So we would have figured it out even without that. they just can’t they were actually yeah, there are there are companies that are specifically looking and and looking at at at what’s going into npm to go and see if if stuff’s going in that’s bad. And obviously it’s kind of one of those things where you target the c the the ones that are get a lot of downloads.

Kate Holterhoff (21:55)
Uh-huh. you okay, got it.

Right.

Jack Herrington (22:14)
‘Cause we’re the ones that are most impactful. And so, you know, TanStack’s got a a l bunch of packages, including amazingly, TanStack Router, which is on that that list. I mean, I gotta say, can from my perspective, it’s it’s pretty amazing how TanStack Start has bloomed in the last like I’d say six months or so.

Kate Holterhoff (22:14)
Sure. Absolutely, yeah.

Mm.

Yeah.

Jack Herrington (22:31)

yeah, from being like a kind of a niche niche thing to being a a really viable competitor with Next.js. Like our download our upload our our downloads have have have sp really gone up. And so that’s why, you know, you get the attention on of the malicious folks, and that’s also why you get on the security scanner list, you know, sort of this one and that one together. Good place to be and bad place to be, I guess.

Kate Holterhoff (22:40)
Yeah, huh.

Yeah. Right, right. So the good with the bad there.

yes. Okay. So your unit test would have found it eventually. Did you like speed up how often unit tests run then? Like is that part of the mitigation?

Jack Herrington (23:04)
Yeah.

Well it just run

it’s just triggered based on code changes, right? So yeah. right. But well in this case what would happen was the we’d run unit tests again on the the poison stuff as part of the legitimate release, right? And that that that actually didn’t pass unit tests and that we we saw that too. So that that was an addition. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (23:11)
Okay. Which makes it perfect sense. Okay, got it.

Mm-hmm.

okay. So you

had two two signals coming in.

Jack Herrington (23:38)
Yeah. The other another important thing that is I kind of glossed over, but really important to know out of this is like we have a a very security-centric process for releasing these packages. And it’s a kind of a pain in the butt, actually, as a maintainer, it’s kind of a pain. So think about like like the nuclear release codes kind of thing. In order for us to get a package out, or me.

Kate Holterhoff (23:46)
Okay.

All right. Yeah.

man.

Jack Herrington (24:06)
Like I’ve got a one. Do a PR on the packs itself, get it approved that that requires another person right there to do that. Then that’s gotta go into main, then that’s gotta get built, and then that creates a change set PR. So that’s another

Kate Holterhoff (24:15)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Herrington (24:22)
pull request that needs another human review. So that’s another key switch. And then finally when that gets run, then that actually gets published. And of course, if people are on like a pnpm thing where you know it’s a minimum of a day, it’ll still be a day before they even are able to use it. So we are very security conscious even before this, right? That that was all happened before all this. The way that they were able to do this particular thing is kind of come in as I say through that back

Kate Holterhoff (24:25)
my god.

Mm.

Jack Herrington (24:52)
door of hey we’re not even gonna go and try to do like a legit thing here, do a PR, get it review, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, none of that. This is all like we’re gonna come in the back door through this cache that you’re reusing and we’re gonna poison that cache and then we’re gonna like kind of linger around until the Next release and then we’re gonna go and be part of that and then put it out.

Kate Holterhoff (25:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm. Okay.

Yeah. So the complexity of that is reminding me of what you know, as I speak to these security conscious folks who are saying it’s a brave new world out there, we’re all struggling to keep up. they talk a lot about chained attacks and that that’s the kind of thing that Mythos is good at finding. Would you consider this to be chained because there were so many different things that needed to happen in a sequence? Okay, there we go.

Jack Herrington (25:36)
Mm-hmm. Very much so. Yeah,

Kate Holterhoff (25:39)
Okay,

Jack Herrington (25:39)
yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (25:39)
so this is this is it. This is the a good example that we could all point to and say, like, here is a chained attack and this is why this is so dangerous because yeah, we we can’t function the way that we have in the past. Okay. This is this is helpful.

Jack Herrington (25:50)
Yeah. So there was a a pull request target attack. And then that was that gave access so they could do a cache poisoning thing. And then there was an yeah, an o an OIDC token extraction thing from the memory. I mean, it was like there was it was a multi-step, extremely well researched and implemented attack. And like none of those pieces alone would be enough. It was, it was, it was impressive, which makes me think kind of like as we as we were looking through this, I’m like, this is

This is certainly a human aided by AI. You know, possibly yeah. yeah. I mean I mean, you know, I mean you gotta think about like the i just the the number the the the kind of I don’t know, picayune like little vulnerabilities they had to l yeah, as you say, like chain together. It’s just it’s just super impressive. I just and then to get almost nothing out of it, I just d amazes me. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (26:27)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right, right.

No. Yeah

I mean it used to be when we would cease to tell.

Jack Herrington (26:51)
It’s gotta cost more in tokens

to do all the research than it did to actually what they got back.

Kate Holterhoff (26:57)
Well yeah, in this case. But I mean, well, we’ll we’ll get into that. But I I mean what’s in yeah. I just I when I think about the like broader picture of where we are today with all of these types of attacks. you know, it used to be you’d go to like an a HR would have a video about like if you’d find a USB drive on in the parking lot, don’t plug it into your machine. Or like, you know, don’t hit phishing attack emails. And it’s like that is

Jack Herrington (27:17)
Don’t plug it in your machine. Exactly.

Kate Holterhoff (27:25)
That’s like cute now. That’s pedestrian. We don’t we’ve moved beyond that. That is not even a thing.

Jack Herrington (27:26)
It’s Yeah.

Although I’m sure it’s

gonna come back around again because people are like so in tune to like these hyper focus attacks that like you know, the random like, you know, person calling you up saying, Hey, hey, it’s you know, my nephew or whatever. Yeah, right.

Kate Holterhoff (27:37)
Yeah.

To the bank. God,

that yeah. Okay. So we’ve supercharged the bad actors. They got in. You Sadly, I know. So you wrote this postmortem. you would have found it anyways. They found it, so a couple folks pointed this out. but one of the things that, jumped out to me on the postmortem that you posted on TanStack’s website was that,

Jack Herrington (27:53)
We have, sadly.

Kate Holterhoff (28:11)
This was a GitHub GitHub knew about this, that they had alerted you to that that this is possible. so I I mean I guess we could take this two ways. Like a you know, when you take responsibility like, okay, we we knew this was a possibility. I’m sure there’s like a million of these sort of situations of like, you know, knowing that th there’s so much minutiae there, but but there was that. I mean, so my question is two

Jack Herrington (28:31)
Yeah. I mean like that’s the thing with

GitHub, it’s like they yes, sure, but they also there is also penalty for like the GitHub Actions and the amount of CPU that it takes and all this. And we are an open source group and we only have certain amount of credits for GitHub Actions, which is what drive you know it they’re incredibly important. Like every single pull request is is run through GitHub Actions and all this. And it just it’s

Kate Holterhoff (28:42)
Yeah.

Jack Herrington (29:00)
So trying to hype optimize that is is important for us, right? It reduces our spend or or it reduces our our credit usage and because we don’t want to get cut off. If we get cut off, then we don’t actually I can’t can’t actually release anything. So that that that’s not good. Yeah. So it’s kind of like here we got a vulnerability because you’re using this cache stuff, but you also have to use the cache stuff because yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (29:16)
Yeah. Yeah. I actually

You have to use the cache. Okay.

So you you’ve you’ve g guessed my question here, which is like it sounds like GitHub could be making this easier on open source maintainers by perhaps relaxing token what the the price of tokens so that you’re not forced to cache and have this vulnerability that they already knew about and had told you about. You know, so ’cause it so that that that’s what I’m hearing at least. What what would you say? Like what could GitHub have done

Jack Herrington (29:29)
Well we do Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (29:55)
To have helped you. Like maybe, you know, they they did tell you, but like could they have done anything else that maybe would have eased this?

Jack Herrington (30:02)
I mean, I think coming out with standardized flows that they would support, you know, for for the standard packages or the the the standard environments that folks use. I think yeah

Kate Holterhoff (30:06)
interesting.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Jack Herrington (30:16)
Google has one of these already that I use on my own projects that is is a nice CI/CD flow. It’s just a complicated thing. We actually have like one of those 17 packages is something that most people don’t use. There’s a company called which we use internally in all of our packages called TanStack Config, and it does all of this work. And the reason that we have one to do it is because we want them all to run the same way. because we don’t want to solve that problem n number of times. But

Kate Holterhoff (30:33)
huh.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jack Herrington (30:45)
These CI/CD flows are like they’re complex, like really complex. You know, and and handling like it would be great, honestly, if they had a like a real excit because so many projects use Node, like why not just kind of hyperoptimize at least that, right? Like the at least the the node modules kind of ecosystem. So many projects use this that it would be good to like just hyperoptimize that in particular.

Kate Holterhoff (30:49)
my god. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, like a golden path situation and maybe even guardrails around it. Yeah, that’s interesting. I d I listened to an interview with

Jack Herrington (31:16)
Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Now of course they could be doing that. And

I and I could just be like, ’cause it’s not my day job to like do like I I’m one of those people who like once I get the CI/CD working, I I don’t want to touch it actively. I’m like can’t like it’s it’s like one of those saltwater fish tanks. Like you get it running, you don’t mess with it, right? You just do don’t mess with it.

Kate Holterhoff (31:34)
Hands off. Right.

Don’t mess with it, yeah.

Jack Herrington (31:43)
‘Cause I I wanna s I just wanna work on the app. I just wanna work on my AI libraries or whatever, you know, add new features, do the fun stuff. I I don’t care about build. Who cares about build? Like I’m sure no, there are people out there who like who really care about build. So I don’t wanna offend those folks, but like I don’t personally. Not my deal.

Kate Holterhoff (31:46)
Right.

Absolutely, yeah.

No one I know.

Yeah. Right. Well

though I anyone who’s listening to this recognizes that you are a developer, a passionate one, and so this is your personal opinion and they’re entitled to their own. yeah, okay. So I I I w it’s reminding me though of an interview I listened to with Feross from Socket, the security company. You you’re familiar, yes. And he had talked about

Jack Herrington (32:21)
Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (32:25)
There being

like some vulnerability with GitHub where it was like older commits could then be used against them. And there was like a way to get out of it. Anyways, so there are there’s things in the pipes at GitHub that make it challenging to keep things locked down, even if they know it’s a vulnerability. so a and perhaps at at this point they’ve even improved that. I can I can provide a link to that episode. It was on the JavaScript Jabber podcast.

And and Feross is just great. He’s so smart. my God. so I I n I know that there are many things going on around npm and security and just like versioning and and trying to lock all that down that make it very challenging to do the right thing for developers. And I think that’s an un that’s not a controversial thing to say. Like it is hard and it’s only getting harder because Yeah.

Jack Herrington (33:17)
For the OSS developers, yes. Right?

but not for the downstream developers. I think the downstream developers, you know, pin your versions if it’s a big deal, but like do the pnpm thing or the the npm. Every every package manager now has a way to go and say, I only want to use packages that have been around for more than a day, which is pretty sane. And

Kate Holterhoff (33:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jack Herrington (33:39)
then you know use that and and only override that when you get like a C V E from I don’t know whatever Next or whatever saying like this one. But even then, like if you if you’re on the day old, you probably don’t get it. You know, you’re probably fine.

Kate Holterhoff (33:49)
It’s no good. Yeah.

Yeah.

Ugh, that’s good. Well, you know, I I love to put on my little tinfoil hat though and think about like the C V E’s we don’t know about. Like, those are the ones that they found. you know, there’s a file cabinet somewhere. Yes. Well those and then just any sort of hacks that we’re not even aware of, or or these chained ones that are possible, but maybe they’re not doing anything outrageous, like, yeah, mining Bitcoin or something that’s like, Whoa, you know, the sirens are blaring. We can you know, we all we’re all aware of this. But like

Jack Herrington (34:04)
The zero days.

Mm-hmm.

Kate Holterhoff (34:22)
the potential exploits. I don’t know. Anyways, I’ll take my tinfoil hat off now. But

Jack Herrington (34:25)
Yeah. Well interesting.

So like it it I’m just not knocked on on Next.js too much, but not Next.js came out with a a set of vulnerabilities around server functions that were actually core React vulnerabilities around server functions. And those were not even chained. Literally you just send any server a malicious payload, one off shot.

Kate Holterhoff (34:45)
Okay.

Jack Herrington (34:50)
And it would go and execute it on the server, and and there you go. Scary, like really scary level of vulnerability in that. the TanStack TanStack Start, which is our competitor with Next.js, uses an entirely different method of server functions. We don’t depend on the React server functions because we support both Solid and React. So we created our own server function mechanism. And our mechanism.

Kate Holterhoff (34:54)
Wow.

Okay.

Jack Herrington (35:18)
We did get a CVE on it based on the underlying like JSON system that we used to encode and decode the the server function data. And it was one of those multi-stage attacks. And even if you were able to get through like all three chained elements of the attack, like you still really wouldn’t get access to all that much. so that was it was nice to see that like TanStack is is really does like even at the

The runtime level takes security really critically. and so we obviously like brought on the the changes to the downstream or the upstream library that did that for us. So we are a much more secure, I would say, framework than Next years.

Kate Holterhoff (36:03)
Yeah. And th then the competition. That’s

fine. A little healthy a little healthy, yeah, competition. That we’ll just leave it there. we we welcome that here. This is a safe space for laying out an argument for why why you think one thing is better than another. This is fine. okay. All right, so so to kind of summarize where we’re what we’ve been talking around here, how how are you comforting the community or or

what? what concrete fixes have you implemented in in order to make sure that this won’t happen again and that the community should feel safe and secure in using any TanStack library available?

Jack Herrington (36:45)
Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned, you know, we we changed our CI/CD policies. I mean, we went through we actually went through our full on like post mortem and came up with a bunch of actions around it. we actually have another we’ve so we had two blog posts on this. We’ve got one blog post on the initial incident and then we had another blog post going in like detailing down to the you know nits and you know nooks and crannies, like everything that we’ve done in here.

It was and in fact it actually impacted me because I had like two two fa on my GitHub account and like I had I think I had like every 2FA on there. Like I I had the authenticator, I had I mean pretty every method that you could have on there. And it was like he was telling me like, hey, you know, you can’t access the org anymore. I’m like, what?

Kate Holterhoff (37:28)
Mm. Yeah.

Jack Herrington (37:39)
It turns out that like SMS is not a secure or super secure 2FA in their mind. So I actually had to remove it as an option. So I can’t do SMS level 2FA anymore. I have to use the authenticator. Which is fine because they use one password, and one password does an awesome job at OTA. So or at yeah, at OTA. So it’s like.

Kate Holterhoff (37:45)

Wow.

Yeah.

Jack Herrington (38:02)
And and like fingerprint authentication and all that stuff. So it was not a big deal. But it was interesting. Like even even that. And this is even after we did a whole thing around OIC OIDC tokens and changing the published flow. I mean, this has been this been an ongoing thing for months now, this this the npm stuff and and changes of security both on the npm side and on the GitHub side. You know, so it’s kind of like

Kate Holterhoff (38:05)
Okay.

Jack Herrington (38:31)
It’s good, but it because it’s making us more secure, but it’s also like it does take quite a bit of time and and effort to get that, you know, right. So yeah. Yeah, it’s a thing. And hassle.

Kate Holterhoff (38:41)
Okay. All right. Amazing. Okay. So the the community

should feel much better. they should if they were worried, they should say, Hey, there were You did. Okay.

Jack Herrington (38:49)
Yeah, like we pay we pay the the tax, you know, in in in

in the the the pain of of doing this. And then you guys get the you you guys get the benefits. But I would say you as consumers, like set that minimum age, my friends. Like that’s that’s the big deal right there. Cause I these things don’t last. Like if it was the packages were out for about three hours.

Kate Holterhoff (38:56)
Right.

We get the better.

Yes. Okay.

Jack Herrington (39:16)
So that that’s it. The whole window of time, you’d have to go ahead and have downloaded the package within that three hour window. They were pulled out of the npm repository, they’re gone, gone. Can’t can’t get it. And so if you had that minimum age set to a day, you would have not been impacted by this at all. And do you really want it better? You know, more recent than a package. I mean more recent than an A. I mean, come on. Like really, yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (39:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Okay, no one’s beta testing packages anymore. This is you know, we don’t want to be doing that.

Jack Herrington (39:49)
Well he could, but I mean if

you could if like like the production stuff though. Nobody’s gonna go and yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (39:54)
Okay.

One would hope. okay. I mean this is what makes me nervous, We got all these vibe coders, myself included, And I don’t know, it’s late at night, I’m hitting just accept, accept, accept on Claude code, I d who who said that? Is that me? Is that yeah. so I don’t know.

Jack Herrington (39:57)
One will

What no Yeah,

Well, as in gamble,

like on Netlify. So if you go and Netlify vibe code a project, so we have this thing called start with agent runners and you can go on to Netlify, create a site or create a pro a project, and then literally this is a prompt and it’s like, Hey, I wanna such and such and such and such. And it goes off and it uses Claude or Codex or whatever to go and build it for you. It’s actually a really cool thing. And we create TanStack Start projects. Ta da. We

Kate Holterhoff (40:41)
Okay.

Jack Herrington (40:47)
Now lovable does too. So there’s a whole bunch of companies that are starting to like generate TanStack Start as their default kind of project kit. And we have pinned all the version numbers of those TanStack Start.

Kate Holterhoff (40:52)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Herrington (40:59)
versions because that’s what we do. We want to make sure that you you are starting off with a really rock solid starting point. And so we pin all the versions and then we test it all, make sure that all those starting kits work. And then like later on, like maybe a week, whatever, some some period of time later, we want to go and update that and we do a refresh pass where we bring in you know the newer packages. But you know, we’re giving you a good, stable, secure starting point. So yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (41:26)
Huh.

I like that. Okay. So kind of offloading that part of it that could be dangerous to a trusted provider, a cloud provider.

Jack Herrington (41:33)
Yeah. Hey, you could go and ask the you could

Sure, you but you could go on and say to Claude, Hey, I wanna be on the cutting edge stuff, my man. Go and make it happen. So up to you.

Kate Holterhoff (41:42)
geez.

yeah. Well let me ask you this then, because this is one approach that many open source projects have have taken is to close down external PRs. And so Ladybird is the most recent to join in this. We’ve also got Ghostty, so Mitchell Hashimoto’s project, and then tldraw. So are you okay. Okay. Yeah. So I mean there’s there are many. And th and those are just the ones that kind of got a lot of press. So

Jack Herrington (42:01)
I love Ghostty. I’m a ghosty fan, ghosty user. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (42:11)
We got three now, and in RedMonk’s terms, that’s a quorum. Like that’s a trend at this point. So we’ve got three projects. You do. Tell me about it.

Jack Herrington (42:15)
Well we we have that too. Actually we have that was one

of the things that we did was we added this code code owners file to the GitHub repo. And so those are the ones that can actually go and do the deploy. You actually have to be one of those people to like initiate like the PR deploy. So yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (42:28)
Okay.

Wow. Okay.

So if I am a nobody or maybe me, yeah, actually I am a random. So if I did it, what would happen? Do I have to like email you? Because I know some projects have done that where it’s like you have like reach out

Jack Herrington (42:38)
So Rando is not gonna be able to do it.

Well, just would it would need

to be approved by me and then I so I would need to be on the PR in order to to go and actually get it to to merge in. So that has to be part of it. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (42:57)
Interesting. Okay,

got it. All right. So, hmm, all right. Well, shoot. I should add that to my list then. You know, I’ve been maintaining, I’m up to like eighty-nine projects now, of open source projects, and they’re AI policies. And there’s a lot of nuance in there. You know, everyone’s kinda y I haven’t shared this with you. I I will I will do that. AI pol AI maintain yeah, so a lot of open source projects for Yeah, so like how

Jack Herrington (43:12)
that’s interesting.

AI policies.

like AI P R generated PR product. yes.

Kate Holterhoff (43:25)
How should contributors act around AI? Because some projects say absolutely no AI, no, no, no, no, no. Others say, well, you can use AI, but you have to tell us about it. And then they’ve got a little tag that they want you to use, like particular language. And then other ones say, you know, we’re using AI, but we’re not allowing external PRs, like Steve Ruiz says at for tldraw. so we’ve got all kinds of different approaches to how this should look.

Jack Herrington (43:28)
Mm.

Kate Holterhoff (43:52)
but I just added a new section last week for this use case of like no external PRs. Because but there’s some nuance in there, right? Like some are allowing them, but like in your case where it’s like you have to have it’s not just like open. It’s you need to have somebody, you know, I guess sponsor you. Like you have to be a known commodity. And yeah. Right. And even I’ve heard this from maintainers where they say,

Jack Herrington (44:11)
Yeah, essentially. When you wanna land it, right? Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (44:18)
Like be a face. Just don’t be an anonymous person. Like reach out, join the Discord, become a person that we can be like, okay, this this person is cool.

Jack Herrington (44:28)
It’s a serious problem. Like that it you there are and every project is getting flooded with this stuff. I mean, I remember as part of like the Friend and Fire podcast, we would talk about you know the issue with junior engineers not getting, you know, hired, not having opportunities, not being known. And one of our answers to that was, you know, do some PRs. And this is kind of pre AI days. And so, yeah, encouraging people to do PRs, but then

Kate Holterhoff (44:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Ooh.

Jack Herrington (44:56)
People are like kind of lazy. So they’re like, you know, hey, Claude, what you know, make a PR for this project. It goes and does whatever, right? And then that kind of like gets out of hand. And so if OSS developers are getting flooded with this stuff, and that’s kind of a burden on top of everything else. Most of these folks aren’t getting paid anything, getting, you know, they’re getting burned out. It’s not great.

Kate Holterhoff (44:58)
Mm-hmm.

No no no no no no no.

Yes.

Mm.

Jack Herrington (45:21)
I would say the only project I can speak of when it comes to TanStack around this is AI. We’re fine with AI with AI generated PRs. Most of TanStack AI was written with AI. So it kinda came out like we started writing it mm, like November last year, I would say, in that kind of range.

Kate Holterhoff (45:40)
yeah, that’s when they

were getting good.

Jack Herrington (45:42)
Yeah, and the the AI’s really getting good and and so we we wrote a lot of it with AI. Everything was we we we looked through all the code, manual code reviews and all that, but a lot of it was was AI generated. And yeah, and there are various parts of it too that are sort of more or less reviewed like that. Like the core stuff, like the main kind of loop of the AI stuff, the agentic loop is obviously like very we looked over that

Kate Holterhoff (45:45)
Yeah.

Amazing.

Jack Herrington (46:10)
in every little milk and cranny. But we a lot of demo apps in there. I don’t know. You know, you just feel like yeah, okay. It works. You know, it does the stuff.

Kate Holterhoff (46:13)
huh.

Yeah. Okay.

Have you so there’s, you know, always been jokes about developers not being security minded. Have you noticed that since a lot of this has been going on that folks have become more so, where they are suddenly like, Hey, security’s a big deal. We we wanna be involved in the CISO office. You know, like we we wanna bang down the door and say like security’s super important today and we, you know, we we care about it and we’re paying attention.

You’re laughing.

Jack Herrington (46:44)
no,

I do. I do. Like I I I definitely think a lot about because I I I pay for, personally pay for a lot of like AI services. And those AI services have the API keys, and that’s what these things are rooting around for. So my personal setup, I’ve worked hard to try and not leak any of that stuff.

Kate Holterhoff (47:02)
Yes. huh.

Okay.

Jack Herrington (47:12)
But again, this like this exploit could have gotten that as well because at the point, well, hmm, that’s an interesting one too. Nowadays there’s some mechanisms that you can use that’ll actually like the app itself doesn’t even have the API token. It’s the they’ve got some sort of like API token placeholder that’s like insert API token here. And then when they make the request, the shell that is actually around the app.

Kate Holterhoff (47:27)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Jack Herrington (47:38)
Then intercepts that request and puts in the actual API token before it goes off to the LLM or whatever. So even if you were to get into the app itself, you wouldn’t even have the credentials at runtime, which is pretty cool. I I don’t run that way. But there is there is like I think Deno, they just did was it claw? It’s like a

Kate Holterhoff (47:52)
Yeah.

Jack Herrington (48:01)
It’s like a claw container thing that they have where you know you run your app inside of this thing and then it goes and makes sure that you don’t do anything nefarious kind of deal, where you it is or you is in this case like your app or your claw. so the there’s more of these kind of harnesses coming out. but yeah, no, it is definitely a thing where it’s like, I think about this a lot. You kind of have to, which is not great.

Kate Holterhoff (48:04)
Okay.

huh.

Yes.

Okay.

Jack Herrington (48:28)
But it is yeah it’s kind of the n nature of the beast, unfortunately.

Kate Holterhoff (48:28)
I know. I know.

Okay, so you think this is more developers y you personally and possibly everyone everyone should be thinking about it. You are thinking about it. We could perhaps interpret that as a signal that more developers are becoming security conscious. We we’ll go that far. This is not a

Jack Herrington (48:39)
Yeah.

Yeah. I wish I could just like spend all my time focused on app stuff, you know. Like yeah, like making the customer happy. That’s what matters to me. But no, I have you have to think a lot about like

Kate Holterhoff (48:50)
Yeah. Coding. Right. Mm-hmm. Building architect yes.

Jack Herrington (48:59)
You know, all the front end security, are my API routes secure? Are they secure from like you know, abuse, not just like security stuff, but also am I opening up like an AI gateway endpoint here that basically anybody can use to like back in their Claude code or whatever, you know, and then eat my tokens and you know, all that stuff.

Kate Holterhoff (49:07)
Yeah.

Okay. Well, as we are coming up on time, let me ask you one final question here as a wrap up. what sort of advice would you give to maintainers as they are in invariably going to be encountering more of these security incidents? Like what was your main takeaway that you would want to share with other folks who might may find themselves in a a similar exploited situation in the future?

Jack Herrington (49:50)
Well it depends. Like you know, post exploited, actually having been exploited, I mean that that yeah, that that’s a defire yeah, that’s a defire thing. but I mean pre exploit, like how do you make sure that you don’t get exploited in the first place? my thing would be

Kate Holterhoff (49:55)
Take it where you will. Take it where you will. Okay.

Yeah.

Jack Herrington (50:07)
In this case, use off the shelf CI/CD stuff. So if Google makes like a package that’s gonna go and do a change set workflow, which is really good and they have this, like just just camp on that, right? Because they’ve done all the security work and all the rest of it. And so leverage that for your own stuff. Don’t necessarily try and DIY that solution. It’s very tempting, you know, but don’t. You know, use off the shelf stuff.

Kate Holterhoff (50:10)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Okay.

Jack Herrington (50:37)
Yeah, that’s that would be one of my biggest things. Maybe also like pin upstream dependencies in your in your package, ’cause then you’re not gonna have to like you don’t even even if they get up upstream exploited, like you’re not gonna get you know ’cause you’re you’re pinned on a version that you can trust.

Kate Holterhoff (50:38)
Yeah. That that’s it. Yeah.

Got it. Okay. All right. Man, it just all comes down to supply chain these days. Every everywhere I look. okay. Everything is supply chain. Okay. All right. Well

Jack Herrington (51:02)
Everything’s supply chain attack. Yep. Yeah, it’s a big supply chain. Like no you know, you you start with almost any app, right? And the node modules ecosystem is like massive. Yeah.

Kate Holterhoff (51:09)
Huge.

my god. I

I know. I I don’t envy you working on this stuff in in in this situation. I mean it’s it’s a a huge task. Yeah, so you know, atlas with the world on your shoulders. That’s what I that’s what I imagine. so you’re doing the good work. How can folks keep up with what good work you’re doing, Jack? Like where what’s your social channels? Where should folks follow to to keep up?

Jack Herrington (51:40)
Sure, I’m at @jherr, J J H E R R and almost everywhere on YouTube. You can go to at @jherr and you’ll get my YouTube channel where you can keep up with all things kind of front end slash AI focused. You of course can jump on Front End Fire, the podcast with my friends TJ VanToll and Paige Niedringhaus. And we do that’s more like a news show, which I think is actually kind of cool. it’s not it and it’s all human. Like there’s no there’s no AI generated stuff.

in there no AI generated voice or whatever it’s just us and on twitter is @jherr GitHub is @jherr LinkedIn it’s @jherr I think and then I I don’t know there’s Bluesky but I guess there’s people over there nowadays. I every once in a while I I log in like post something and it’s like I got a couple notifications like okay people are talking over here I guess. Yeah I don’t know.

Kate Holterhoff (52:34)
All right. Okay. So amazing. and yes, and I can attest to to Front End Fire being a great community. And you have a Discord channel for that as as well, right? Where the folks are chatting. Okay. Awesome.

Jack Herrington (52:44)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

That’s one.

Kate Holterhoff (52:49)
Yes, yes. I I feel like that’s for the young’s though. I don’t I’ve got Discord. I go in there for conferences sometimes, but I’m I’m I’m not a I’m not chronic Discord user, so I I guess, yeah, I’m a millennial. I don’t know, we’re like Slack people, I don’t know what it is. yeah, but mostly ’cause we use it at work, red RedMonk’s a a s a slack shop. so we we’re on there.

Jack Herrington (52:57)
Are you a slack person?

Okay. Mm-hmm.

Okay. Well it’s better than teams. Anything’s

better than teams. my hate teams.

Kate Holterhoff (53:12)
All right. I’m sorry to hear that. Yeah. okay,

well, yeah. Okay, so well, I’ll I’ll I’ll close us out here. really enjoyed speaking with you today again. My guest has been Jack Herrington. and my name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.

Amazing.

Jack Herrington (53:42)
See you Next time.