The Fake Meeting
Last week, someone compromised one of the most widely-used software packages in the world. Not by finding a flaw in the code. By building an entire fake company.
The attackers cloned a real company's website. Built a fake Slack workspace with fake channels, fake employee profiles scraped from LinkedIn. Scheduled a video meeting with real-looking participants. And in that meeting, they told a software maintainer — one person, sitting alone at a computer — that he needed to install an update.
He did. It was a trojan.
Through that one person's compromised credentials, the attackers published a poisoned version of Axios — a JavaScript library that millions of applications use to talk to the internet. For a brief window, every application that updated the package received the attackers' code for free.
What strikes me about this story is not the sophistication of the attack. It's the architecture it reveals.
There are roughly thirty million software packages in the npm registry alone — the ecosystem that hosts JavaScript libraries. Most are maintained by one or two people, often for free, often in their spare time. These aren't employees of some vast corporation with security teams and badge-access doors. They're people sitting in apartments and home offices, maintaining things because they care about them, or because they built them once and the world started depending on them before they could say no.
This is the structure underneath the digital world. Not a fortress. A potluck.
Oscar Wilde wrote that "life imitates art far more than art imitates life." The Axios attackers took this literally. They built an elaborate fiction — a company that didn't exist, employees who were phantoms, a meeting room that was a stage set — and reality bent to accommodate it. One real person walked into their theater and played the role they'd written for him, not out of stupidity but out of the ordinary human impulse to trust a meeting invite from what appeared to be a legitimate company.
I think about this in terms of what we verify and what we take on faith.
When you flip a light switch, you trust that someone built the wiring correctly. When you turn on the tap, you trust that someone treated the water. When you open an app on your phone, you trust that thousands of software packages — each maintained by some stranger you'll never meet — haven't been tampered with since yesterday.
The vast majority of this trust is earned. The lights work. The water is clean. The software runs. The system functions not because we've verified each link in the chain, but because almost all the people maintaining those links are exactly who they say they are, doing exactly what they appear to be doing.
But that "almost" is doing an extraordinary amount of work.
Carl Sagan wrote that "for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." He was talking about the cosmos, but I think the same thing is true of the internet. The vastness of our interconnection — the dizzying complexity of the systems we've built on top of each other, library on top of library, trust on top of trust — is bearable only because most of the people at the bottom of the stack are doing their work out of something that, if it isn't love, is at least its practical cousin: care, craft, the quiet satisfaction of building something that works and watching strangers depend on it.
The Axios attack didn't exploit a bug in the code. It exploited the fact that software infrastructure runs on the same fuel every other human system runs on: the assumption that most people are acting in good faith. And they are. That's what makes the deception possible — not that we're gullible, but that trust is, almost always, the correct bet.
Here is the uncomfortable part: there is no purely technical fix for this. You cannot engineer your way around the fact that systems built by humans require human trust. You can add two-factor authentication, code-signing, review processes — and you should — but at the end of every verification chain, there is a person. And people can be fooled. Not because they're weak, but because they're social creatures living in a world where most interactions are genuine.
The Celtic tradition has a tree for this problem. The rowan — Luis in the old Irish Ogham alphabet — was planted at doorways for protection. Not protection through strength, but through discernment. Its magic was supposed to be the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is illusion. I like that the ancients located protection not in walls but in perception. Not in keeping everything out, but in seeing clearly what's already there.
We built the internet the way you build a barn in a small town: everyone shows up, everyone does their part, and the thing goes up in a day because nobody's checking credentials at the door. For thirty years, that approach has worked astonishingly well. The barn is enormous now. The town is not small anymore.
But we still need the people who show up because they care. That hasn't changed. The foundation of the whole structure is not cryptography or firewalls or any clever technical mechanism. It's someone, alone at their keyboard, maintaining something for free because it would bother them to let it break.
That's the thing worth protecting. Not just with better security tools — though yes, those too — but with the recognition that the person at the bottom of the dependency chain is the most important person in it. They're holding up your app, your bank, your hospital's scheduling system. And they're doing it on a Saturday afternoon because they said they would.
The vastness is bearable only through love. Even when the vastness is mostly JavaScript.