The Axios Hack: How a single compromised account put millions of developers at risk

Why the axios supply chain attack opens a new chapter in modern cybercrime and raises a warning that the open-source software ecosystem may be far more fragile than anyone wants to admit

If you’ve ever built a website, run a startup, or shipped software of any kind in the last decade, there’s a good chance you’ve used axios. It’s one of those software tools that powers enormous chunks of the internet. It is a JavaScript library that handles the basic but essential task of fetching data from servers. Millions of developers and automated systems download it every single week. This week, hackers tried to burn it down in one of the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever executed against an npm package. Axios is an npm package — an npm (Node Package Manager) is like an App Store for code and developers use it download pre-build software tools.