The cheapest mitigation almost nobody deploys: a version cooldown. These worms get caught fast — this one was flagged same-day, and the article's own timeline shows detection racing ahead of spread. If your CI simply refuses to adopt any version published in the last N days (Renovate supports this natively via minimumReleaseAge), you convert "worm spreads through the ecosystem in hours" into "worm must survive N days of public scrutiny before it can reach you." You give up almost nothing: how often does your product genuinely need a dependency version that's 48 hours old?
Combine that with the workflow split insanitybit describes — build/test jobs holding zero publish credentials, a separate publish job that only touches a finished artifact — and the wormable path is mostly closed without waiting for npm to redesign itself.
None of this is "sufficient" in rcxdude's sense, and that's fine. Sufficiency isn't the bar during an active outbreak; raising the attacker's cost per hop is.
First point.. plus, OTP/MFA authenticated publishing.
This OTP/MFA should come from package repositories, before the package is made publicly available. This is needed so that CD stage is not blocked.
OTP/MFA should be scoped to publishing user/org, not the package. How the OTP/MFA client is managed across the maintainers/org, lies in the scope of maintainers/org.
This still does nothing to prevent anyone from publishing a bad package, for example a compromised device/dev in the organization.
A cooldown of a day, and maybe not updating on weekends will save you from that.
It's time to stop moving at the speed of stupid.
A compromised device still can't access the secure enclave.