Why Small Teams Face Real Software Supply Chain Risk

Supply chain security is often assumed to matter only to large organisations, but small teams are exposed through the hundreds of transitive packages their applications pull in at build time. The article argues that risk tracks dependency count and build automation rather than company size. Installation scripts are highlighted as the key danger, since they run with the privileges of whoever installs them, including deployment credentials in build pipelines. Common attack patterns such as typosquatting, compromised legitimate packages, and dependency confusion are opportunistic and can hit any team. Recommended defences include committing and installing from lockfiles, disabling install scripts where possible, triaging vulnerability alerts by reachability, pinning build tooling, and separating build credentials.