The Axios team just published a full postmortem about their recent supply chain attack, and honestly, it’s terrifying. Not because it was some zero-day exploit or sophisticated code vulnerability, but because it was breathtakingly simple social engineering that could have worked on almost any of us.
Here’s what happened: attackers identified Jason Saayman, one of the Axios maintainers, and crafted a targeted campaign specifically for him. They set up fake job interviews or meetings that required him to install software at the last minute. The pressure of not wanting to be late, combined with the legitimacy of the setup, meant he clicked through installation prompts quickly. That software contained a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) that stole his credentials, which were then used to publish malicious packages.
The Attack Pattern We Should All Know
Google documented this attack pattern in their threat intelligence blog, showing how UNC1069 has been using it to target cryptocurrency and AI companies. The attackers aren’t breaking into systems through technical vulnerabilities anymore. They’re exploiting human psychology and the chaotic reality of modern software development.
I’ve been in this exact situation dozens of times. You get a meeting invite, click the link, and suddenly you’re being asked to install Webex or Microsoft Teams or some other conferencing software you don’t have. The meeting starts in two minutes. Everyone’s waiting. You frantically click “yes” through every prompt just to get in the room.
That time pressure is the exploit. Not a buffer overflow or SQL injection, but your anxiety about being late.
Why Open Source Maintainers Are Prime Targets
The sophistication here isn’t in the malware itself. It’s in the targeting. Someone did reconnaissance on Jason, understood his role, his projects, and crafted an approach that would work specifically on him. This wasn’t a spray-and-pray phishing campaign. This was a sniper shot.
If you maintain any open source package with significant downstream dependencies, you need to assume you’re being researched right now. Attackers know that compromising one maintainer of a widely-used library is worth far more than breaking into a hundred individual companies. The supply chain multiplier effect is incredible.
Think about it: how many companies use Axios? Thousands? Tens of thousands? One compromised maintainer account gives you a distribution channel into all of them simultaneously.
What Actually Protects Against This
Two-factor authentication helps, but only if the credentials aren’t being stolen in real-time by a RAT that can intercept your session tokens. Hardware security keys are better. Requiring multiple maintainers to sign off on releases is better still.
But the real defense is awareness. Knowing this attack exists and how it works. Being suspicious of last-minute meeting requests from people you don’t know. Having a policy that you never install software during time-pressure situations. Taking five minutes to verify the legitimacy of requests, even if it means being late to a meeting.
I know that sounds paranoid. But if you maintain infrastructure that millions of developers depend on, a little paranoia is justified.
The Broader Implications
This attack represents a shift in how supply chain compromises happen. We’ve spent years hardening our technical infrastructure, improving security practices, and building better sandboxing. So attackers adapted. They’re going after the humans now, because humans are still running wetware 1.0 with all the original bugs.
The postmortem from the Axios team is valuable not because it reveals new technical vulnerabilities, but because it documents a social engineering pattern that’s clearly being reused across targets. Sharing these stories openly is how we build collective immunity.
Every time I join a meeting now, I’m going to be thinking about whether I’m being targeted, and honestly, that’s probably the right level of caution for anyone maintaining critical infrastructure that the internet runs on.