Arrange Act Assert

Jag Reehals thinking on things, mostly product development

Tag: security

3 posts tagged “security”.

Your .env File Is Not a Secret Store

21 Apr 2026

Most teams make one of two mistakes with secrets.

The first is obvious.

The second is more common in teams that have already fixed the first one.

Both come from the same misunderstanding about what a .env file is supposed to do.

Your .env File Is Not a Secret Store

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Log the Fingerprint, Not the Secret

21 Apr 2026

When something goes wrong with your application's configuration, you need to know what was loaded and where it came from.

Most tools for answering that question either tell you too much or nothing at all.

There's a third option most people haven't considered.

Log the Fingerprint, Not the Secret

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The package manager settings that would have blocked the Axios attack

07 Apr 2026

On the 31st of March 2026, attackers hijacked an npm maintainer account and published malicious versions of axios with a remote access trojan baked in. npm pulled the bad releases after about two or three hours, but that was enough. Anyone who ran npm install axios during that window could have installed the trojan. The article Post Mortem: axios npm supply chain compromise has all the details.

This kind of attack keeps happening and the playbook barely changes: compromise an account, push a malicious update, hope people install it before anyone notices, get removed a few hours later.

Every major package manager now lets you defend against this. In this post I'll show you the setup for npm, pnpm, Bun and Yarn.

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