I Analyzed 1,000 npm Packages for Security Vulnerabilities — Here's What I Found

The Experiment I wrote a script that scans the top 1,000 most-downloaded npm packages for known vulnerabilities using only free APIs . No paid tools. No enterprise subscriptions. The results were... concerning. The Setup Three free data sources: npm Registry API — package metadata, versions, maintainers GitHub Advisory Database — CVEs by ecosystem npms.io — quality and maintenance scores import requests import time def scan_package ( name ): """ Scan a single npm package for security issues. """ # 1. Get package metadata pkg = requests . get ( f " https://registry.npmjs.org/ { name } " ). json () latest = pkg . get ( " dist-tags " , {}). get ( " latest " , " unknown " ) maintainers = pkg . get ( " maintainers " , []) # 2. Check GitHub advisories advisories = requests . get ( f " https://api.github.com/advisories " , params = { " ecosystem " : " npm " , " package " : name } ). json () # 3. Get quality score quality = requests . get ( f " https://api.npms.io/v2/package/ { name } " ). jso