On January 9, 2022, developers worldwide faced a sudden disruption: their builds were broken. This wasn't due to a zero-day exploit or a sophisticated supply chain attack, but rather a maintainer intentionally sabotaging his own packages.
Marak Squires, the maintainer of the npm packages colors and faker, released malicious updates that caused infinite loops, printing gibberish to the console. The colors package alone receives over 20 million downloads weekly. The problematic version was downloaded 95,397 times before npm intervened.
This was not a hack. It was a protest against Fortune 500 companies using his work for free while he struggled financially.
Timeline
January 8, 2022: Squires published a GitHub article titled "Respectfully, I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s (and other smaller-sized companies) with my free work."
January 9, 2022: Version 1.4.1 of colors and version 6.6.6 of faker were published with code causing infinite loops and ASCII art.
January 9, 2022 (hours later): Thousands of builds failed. GitHub issues flooded both repositories. Snyk issued vulnerability alerts.
January 10, 2022: npm reverted the packages to previous versions and suspended Squires' publishing rights.
Weeks following: Teams scrambled to pin dependencies, audit lockfiles, and implement package health checks they should have had in place already.
Which Controls Failed or Were Missing
Dependency pinning: Teams using ^1.4.0 or * in their package.json files automatically pulled the malicious version. No human reviewed the change before it hit production.
Pre-deployment testing: The infinite loop would have been immediately visible in any test environment. Many teams deployed dependency updates directly to production without running their test suites.
Package health monitoring: No automated alerts were in place when a critical dependency published a new version. There were no checks for unusual version patterns (6.6.6) or sudden behavioral changes.
Supply chain visibility: Teams couldn't answer basic questions: Which projects use these packages? Are we running the affected versions? What's our rollback procedure?
Vendor risk assessment: Despite relying on packages maintained by a single unpaid developer, no one tracked maintainer stability, funding status, or governance structure.
What the Standards Require
PCI DSS v4.0.1 Requirement 6.3.2 mandates that bespoke and custom software be developed based on industry standards and incorporate information security throughout the software development lifecycle. While this incident involved third-party code, the principle applies: you own your supply chain security.
NIST 800-53 Rev 5 SA-12 (Supply Chain Protection) requires organizations to employ supply chain protection mechanisms including conducting supplier reviews, employing anti-counterfeit technologies, and limiting harm from potential adversaries. A single maintainer deciding to sabotage their own package is exactly the scenario this control addresses.
ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A 8.30 (Outsourcing) requires that risks related to outsourced development be addressed. Every open source dependency is outsourced development. You need documented processes for evaluating, monitoring, and mitigating risks.
SOC 2 Type II CC7.2 (System Operations) requires monitoring of system components. Your dependencies are system components. If you're not monitoring package health, maintainer activity, and version changes, you're not meeting this criterion.
None of these standards say "hope your dependencies stay stable." They require active risk management.
Lessons and Action Items for Your Team
Lock your dependencies today. Use package-lock.json, yarn.lock, or equivalent for every project. Set save-exact: true in your npm config. Version ranges like ^1.4.0 are deployment time bombs.
Implement package health checks. Tools like Snyk, Socket, or GitHub's Dependabot can flag packages with:
- Single maintainer (bus factor of one)
- No recent commits
- Sudden version jumps
- Unusual download patterns
- Lack of funding or sponsorship
Gate dependency updates. New package versions should flow through the same pipeline as code changes: automated tests, security scans, manual review for major versions, staged rollout. Never auto-deploy dependency updates to production.
Map your dependency tree. Run npm ls or yarn why to understand transitive dependencies. You might not directly use colors, but 47 of your dependencies might. Document critical paths and identify single points of failure.
Contribute to sustainability. The maintainer published his frustrations before sabotaging the packages. If your company generates revenue using open source, budget for sponsorships, support contracts, or engineering time contributed upstream. This isn't charity—it's risk management.
Maintain rollback capability. Your deployment pipeline should support instant rollback to the last known good state, including all dependencies. Test this quarterly. When a package breaks, you need to revert in minutes, not hours.
Create a response playbook. Document: Who gets alerted when a critical dependency breaks? What's the decision tree for rollback vs. patching? How do you communicate status to stakeholders? Practice this scenario in tabletop exercises.
The colors incident happened because teams treated open source dependencies as infrastructure—stable, maintained, guaranteed. They're not. They're code written by humans, often unpaid humans, who can quit, burn out, or make bad decisions.
Your compliance framework should treat every dependency as a vendor relationship. Because that's exactly what it is.
