ComCat

Most npm supply chain attacks never get a CVE.

Shai Hulud, the chalk and debug hijack, and S1ngularity all spread before any advisory existed. Tools that rely on vulnerability databases like npm audit, Dependabot, or Snyk passed them clean because there was nothing in the database yet.

That annoyed me enough that I built a different approach.

Instead of checking advisories, the scanner reads the package source and looks for behaviors common in supply chain attacks. Things like install script abuse, credential theft, unexpected filesystem access, network exfiltration, and obfuscated payloads.

Right now it uses 46 deterministic detectors. No LLMs. same result every time.

Full methodology and dataset notes are here: westbayberry.com/benchmark

Curious what attack patterns people here people here have dealt with before and how they handled them.

You're describing two different things,

The container comparison misses where these attacks actually happen. Containers limit what code can do at runtime. We flag what code intends to do before it ever runs. These are complementary. A container won't stop a postinstall script from reading ~/.ssh/id_rsa and posting it to an attacker's server if your CI environment has network access and a mounted home directory — which most do.

Yes sophisticated attackers adapt. But the current state of npm supply chain attacks is that most don't even try to evade — because nobody's looking at the code. Every major attack in 2025 used the same playbook: credential theft + network exfil + install script abuse. Raising the floor from "zero analysis" to "26 behavioral detectors with cross-signal correlation" eliminates the entire class of low effort attacks and forces the rest into increasingly constrained patterns.