When a popular open-source package hits the news for the wrong reasons, it stops being “a developer thing”. It becomes a leadership topic. Recent headlines around npm reminded many teams that open-source risk isn’t a rare edge case. Even if you were unaffected, it’s a good moment to check whether you can answer basic questions from customers, auditors and your board without a scramble.
What happened
On 8 September 2025, a fake “support” email tricked the owner of a widely used open-source account. The attacker briefly took control and published tainted updates to about 18 very popular building blocks used in countless apps (including “chalk” and “debug”). The bad changes were aimed at meddling with some online-wallet activity in web apps. Many teams moved quickly to remove and roll back the updates. These components are downloaded billions of times each week, so the potential reach was huge. Early reports suggest little confirmed financial loss, but the window of exposure was real and wide.
Read more: https://vercel.com/blog/critical-npm-supply-chain-attack-response-september-8-2025
Why act even if you weren’t exposed
Customer assurance. Enterprise buyers increasingly want evidence. A short note and an “ingredients list” of what’s in a release are much easier to provide if they already exist.
Governance. Boards need a clear view of what changed and what remains to be done. That’s hard to assemble from ad-hoc messages.
Rate of change. Dependencies move quickly. One-off checks age fast.
A better strategy
See it.
A summarised snapshot across all repositories, including vulnerabilities, third-party components and outdated/OSS licences, with a simple split between customer-facing and internal systems.
Fix it.
CEOs can drop the vulnerability list (plus outdated/OSS licence items) straight into the PM tool e.g., Jira or Monday, as assignable tickets. Attach the SBOM, name an owner and due date for each item, and track to closure. Include a short customer note and a board page that state what happened, what was checked and current status.
Sustain it.
A scheduled re-scan and a single chart that shows change over time. Ten minutes on an executive agenda is usually enough.
Where The Code Registry fits
Make the steps above routine rather than exceptional.
- Independent snapshot. TCR analyses repositories and produces an SBOM (the “ingredients list”) of detected open-source components, versions and licences in standard formats, plus a high-level status view across products.
- Shareable evidence. It generates a concise board-ready PDF in plain English (with summaries via our AI assistant, Ada) and can create actions in Jira or Monday so ownership and dates are visible.
- Cadence. Re-scans run on a schedule and show what changed since the last pass, new issues, resolved items and areas that need attention.
- Scope, if needed. Beyond open-source exposure, TCR can highlight complexity hotspots, stale branches and other areas that tend to accumulate risk. It can also surface signals like Developer Output trends or a practical cost-to-replicate estimate to support planning and diligence discussions.
- Privacy by design. Analysis is isolated; stored code is encrypted; optional deletion after analysis is available.
Week one with TCR typically looks like: connect repos, generate a baseline SBOM and status snapshot, create tickets for any high-priority items, agree a re-scan cadence and owners, and add a single trend chart to the exec pack.
Closing thought
You don’t have to wait for the next headline to raise the bar. Whether you use The Code Registry or another approach, aim for three simple outcomes: clear visibility across codebases, evidence you can share without fuss, and a steady cadence that shows progress over time. If those three are in place, the next news cycle is a brief check-in, not a fire drill.
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