I bet the orig dev was considered a known friendly until he decided to unpublish.
Relying on the notion of a "known friendly" to protect packages and namespace does not strike me as a sound practice.
As others may have mentioned, publishing packages really should be fire and forget. If something bad goes out, a replacement should be sent out. And for the life of me, I don't understand why they did not go with the <author/package> scheme.
Re:Alert: NPM modules hijacked
by callmevlad on Wednesday March 23, 2016 @12:40PM
(#11346009)
Yes, as far as I've heard, this was done defensively to prevent malicious actors from claiming these packages.
Also, relevant conversation here in yesterday's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510
nj48 is a known friendly who has identified himself to us. We're going to clarify later today.
https://twitter.com/seldo/status/712673227630313472