When you consider how large many of these open-source ecosystems are and the sheer number of contributors who go completely unnoticed, I think it’s pretty much

When you consider how large many of these open-source ecosystems are and the sheer number of contributors who go completely unnoticed, I think it’s pretty much guaranteed that there’s some software we’re all using or relying on that’s been compromised and the vulnerability has gone completely unnoticed. As an example, think about how many packages get downloaded from npm every single hour without even a single thought by the person downloading it, or in most cases, without even their direct knowledge—what are the odds that they’ve downloaded malware onto their systems? I remember watching a TypeScript-related livestream on YouTube and the guy installed the wrong npm package (due to a typo), which had a postinstall script. He pretty quickly realized it was the wrong package, but only after it downloaded and ran a script on his system. It turned out the package was harmless, but it’s just so easy to harm a large number of users nowadays if you can just find the right target, which is why package maintainers are in such a dangerous position, in my opinion. Sadly, I think the XZ Utils backdoor is just the one that got noticed.