Actual attack this time: A new type of supply-chain attack with serious consequences is flourishing: New dependency confusion attacks take aim at Microsoft, Amazon, Slack, Lyft, and Zillow by Dan G (Mar 6, 2021) ...

The goal of these attacks is to execute unauthorized code inside a target’s internal software build system. The technique works by uploading malicious packages to public code repositories and giving them a name that’s identical to a package stored in the target developer’s internal repository.

Developers’ software management apps often favor external code libraries over internal ones, so they download and use the malicious package rather than the trusted one. Alex Birsan [...] dubbed the new type of supply chain attack dependency confusion or namespace confusion because it relies of software dependencies with misleading names.