How One Hacked Library Can Take Down Thousands of Companies | Feross Aboukhadijeh (Socket)

Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and CEO of Socket, which he started in 2021 to help companies detect and defend against software supply chain attacks. A prolific open source maintainer whose packages are downloaded a billion times a month, Feross recently closed a Series C at a billion-dollar valuation, and Socket now protects nearly 30,000 organizations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Vercel.Anne Dwane sits down with Feross to unpack why the modern software supply chain has become such an attractive target for attackers, and what companies can actually do about it. Feross walks through real recent incidents, including the Axios and LiteLLM compromises that exposed major AI labs, breaking down how attackers used a months-long social engineering play against a single maintainer to hijack a library with 100 million weekly downloads. They get into why coding agents pull in 50% more open source code than human developers and the new risks that creates, why traditional vulnerability scanners miss most real threats, and what Socket Firewall does to protect the developer endpoint itself. The conversation also covers Feross's own path from open source maintainer to enterprise CEO, how Socket balances a free, developer-led product with enterprise sales, and how frontier AI models transformed Socket's ability to analyze code at scale. They close with practical guardrails any organization can put in place today, from lockfiles to minimum release age settings.Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.com or get in touch with us on X @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We'll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.com/signup