There’s also been a regression in how infrastructure is operated.
15 years ago you didn’t let your production infrastructure talk out to the Internet, and if you did, it was via an explicit proxy with allowlisted domains. This significantly limited the damage that a malicious dependency could cause.
With the move to cloud and DevOps, that network security model disappeared.
Cloud does let you do this with VPCs and subnets. Some people don't bother and end up susceptible but it remains best practice even for cloud software
It’s absolutely possible, but almost nobody does, at least until they get breached.
Developers have decided that the convenience of just letting their servers pull arbitrary code off the Internet is more important than the security risks.
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