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When the Common Tools Betray Us
Inside the npm compromise that silently rewrote our trust and what it means for software, law, and our interconnected future
Devona Green Jordan
September 11, 2025
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Interesting Tech Fact:
In the late 1980s, before modern cybersecurity governance frameworks existed, the U.S. Department of Defense quietly released the “Orange Book” (officially the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, 1983), which became one of the first attempts to formalize how governments should evaluate and govern computer security. While rarely discussed today outside of academic circles, the Orange Book established mandatory access controls, audit requirements, and classification levels that influenced not only military systems but also shaped the foundations of later governance models like ISO/IEC 27001. This little-known document is a hidden ancestor of today’s compliance standards, proving that cyber governance didn’t emerge from the digital era alone—it grew out of Cold War anxieties about information integrity and trust.
Introduction
We like to believe that the building blocks of our digital world—tiny open-source packages, dependencies, Node Package Manager (npm) modules—are safe, mostly invisible scaffolding. But on September 8-9, 2025,