Zalgo text refers to certain non-ASCII characters that appear glitchy. 'Please know we are working right now to fix the situation and will have a resolution shortly.' 'It's come to our attention that there is a zalgo bug in the v1.4.44-liberty-2 release of colors,' mocked the developer. Likewise, a sabotaged version 6.6.6 of faker was published to GitHub and npm. The infinite loop introduced in the code will keep running indefinitely printing the gibberish non-ASCII character sequence endlessly on the console for any applications that use 'colors.' These messages included the text 'LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY' followed by a sequence of non-ASCII characters:Ĭolors.js mischievous commit made by 'Marak' (GitHub)

Yesterday, users of popular open-source projects, such as Amazon's Cloud Development Kit (aws-cdk) were left stunned on seeing their applications print gibberish messages on their console. The developer behind popular open-source NPM libraries 'colors' (aka colors.js on GitHub) and 'faker' (aka faker.js on GitHub) intentionally introduced mischievous commits in them that are impacting thousands of applications relying on these libraries. Whereas, faker receives over 2.8 million weekly downloads on npm, and has over 2,500 dependents. The colors library receives over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone and has almost 19,000 projects relying on it. The developer of these libraries intentionally introduced an infinite loop that bricked thousands of projects that depend on 'colors' and 'faker.' Some surmised if the NPM libraries had been compromised, but it turns out there's much more to the story.

Users of popular open-source libraries 'colors' and 'faker' were left stunned after they saw their applications, using these libraries, printing gibberish data and breaking.

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