by junon | 2025-09-09 19:33:00+00:00
Hi, said person who clicked on the link here. Been wanting to post something akin to this and was going to save it for the post mortem but I wanted to address the increase in these sort of very shout-ey comments directed toward me.

> What does that even mean? That's not something that can be updated - that's kind of the point of 2FA.

I didn't sit and read and parse the whole thing. That was mistake one. I have stated elsewhere, I was stressed and in a rush, and was trying to knock things off my list.

Also, 2FA can of course be updated. npm has had some shifts in how it approaches security over the years, and having worked within that ecosystem for the better part of 10-15 years, this didn't strike me as particularly unheard of on their part. This, especially after the various acquisitions they've had.

It's no excuse, just a contributing factor.

> It would be very unusual to write like that in a formal security notification.

On the contrary, I'd say this is pretty par for the course in corpo-speak. When "kindly" is used incorrectly, that's when it's a red flag for me.

> What does "temporarily locked" mean? That's not a thing. Also creating a sense of urgency is a classic phishing technique and a red flag.

Yes, of course it is. I'm well aware of that. Again, this email reached me at the absolute worst time it could have and I made a very human error.

"Temporarily locked" surprises me that it surprises you. My account was, in fact, temporarily locked while I was trying to regain access to it. Even npm had to manually force a password reset from their end.

> Any nonstandard domain is a red flag.

When I contacted npm, support responded from githubsupport.com. When I pay my TV tax here in Germany (a governmental thing), it goes to a completely bizarre, random third party site that took me ages to vet.

There's no such thing as a "standard" domain anymore with gTLDs, and while I should have vetted this particular one, it didn't stand out as something impossible. In my head, it was their new help support site - just like github.community exists.

Again - and I guess I have to repeat this until I'm blue in the face - this is not an excuse. Just reasons that contributed to my mistake.

> NEVER EVER EVER click links in any kind of security alert email.

I'm aware. I've taught this as the typical security person at my respective companies. I've embodied it, followed it closely for years, etc. I slipped up, and I think I've been more than transparent about that fact.

I didn't ask for my packages to be downloaded 2.6 billion times per week when I wrote most of these 10 years ago or inherited them more than five ago. You can argue - rightfully - about my technical failure here of using an outdated form of 2FA. That's on me, and would have protected against this, but to say this doesn't happen to security-savvy individuals is the wrong message here (see: Troy Hunt getting phished).

Shit happens. It just happened to happen to me, and I happen to have undue control over some stuff that's found its way into most of the javascript world.

The security lessons and advice are all very sound - I'm glad people are talking about them - but the point I'm trying to make is, that I am a security aware/trained person, I am hyper-vigilant, and I am still a human that made a series of small or lazy mistakes that turned into one huge mistake.

Thank you for your input, however. I do appreciate that people continue to talk about the security of it all.