Supply chain attacks work because we implicitly trust the update channel. But the same trust assumption appears in other places:
- npm/pip packages where we `npm install` without auditing - AI-generated code that gets committed after a quick glance - The growing "vibe coding" trend where entire features are scaffolded by AI
The Notepad++ case is almost a best-case scenario — it's a single binary from a known source. The attack surface multiplies when you consider modern dev workflows with hundreds of transitive dependencies, or projects where significant portions were AI-generated and only superficially reviewed.
Sandboxing helps, but the real issue is the gap between what code can do and what developers expect it to do. We need better tooling for understanding what we're actually running.
while the problems you describe are valid, my personal experience is fully opposite — trust is decreasing. I do not remember anyone worrying about supply chain 15ish years ago — windows was where the viruses lived, and unix people were installing distros, compiling kernel modules and building tarballs without auditing anything.
I think what I was getting at is more that the volume of unreviewed code is increasing faster than our ability to review it. We're more aware of the risks, but we're also running `npm install` on packages with 200 transitive dependencies and now asking AI to write whole features. The awareness went up but so did the attack surface, and I'm not sure the first is keeping pace with the second.