Protestware taps npm to call out wars in Ukraine, Gaza

ReversingLabs details the discovery of “protestware” in npm packages, including e2eakarev and the es5-ext dependency used by @snyk/sweater-comb, which leverage postinstall scripts to display geo-targeted political messages (e.g., related to Ukraine and Gaza). Although these examples were not observed to be malicious, the report underscores software supply chain risk from hidden behaviors in widely used dependencies, references prior destructive protestware incidents, urges deeper scrutiny of dependencies (especially postinstall scripts), and notes that IoCs were collected for the reviewed packages.