25 ms·

My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack

441 points by Fibonar 6mo ago

Related: Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501426 (483 comments)

A04eArchitect 6mo ago
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deleted 6mo ago
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Fibonar 6mo ago
Callum here, I was the developer that first discovered and reported the litellm vulnerability on Tuesday. I’m sharing the transcript of what it was like figuring out what was going on in real time, unedited with only minor redactions. I didn’t need to recount my thought process after the fact. It’s the very same ones I wrote down to help Claude figure out what was happening. I’m an ML engineer by trade, so having Claude walk me through exactly who to contact and a step by step guide of time-critical actions felt like a game-changer for non-security researchers. I'm curious whether the security community thinks more non-specialists finding and reporting vulnerabilities like this is a net positive or a headache?
- Bullhorn9268 6mo ago
  Not a security researcher, but this is IMHO obviously positive that the other side of the arms race is also getting stronger, and I would argue it's stronger than on the bad guys' side, due to the best being somewhat responsible and adding guardrails. I like the presentation <3.
- rgambee 6mo ago
  I've heard stories lately of open source projects being inundated with vulnerability reports and PRs. But in this case, it seems like AI assistance was clearly a boon for root-causing and reporting this so quickly.
  - latexr 6mo ago
    Yes, in this case. Chances are in the future others will be missed despite being reported, because the maintainers are either inundated or tired of all the other reports and can’t distinguish the real one.
- dot_treo 6mo ago
  Looks like we discovered it at essentially the same time, and in essentially the same way. If the pth file didn't trigger a fork-bomb like behavior, this might have stayed undiscoverd for quite a bit longer. Good thinking on asking Claude to walk you through on who to contact. I had no idea how to contact anyone related to PyPI, so I started by shooting an email to the maintainers and posting it on Hacker News. While I'm not part of the security community, I think everyone who finds something like this, should be able to report it. There is no point in gatekeeping the reporting of serious security vulnerabilities.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - notatallshaw 6mo ago
    > I had no idea how to contact anyone related to PyPI https://pypi.org/security/ https://pypi.org/security/: > If you've identified a security issue with a project hosted on PyPI Login to your PyPI account, then visit the project's page on PyPI. At the bottom of the sidebar, click Report project as malware.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 6mo ago
      The existing account to report is an unfortunate obstacle. Presumably not a huge deal if you were auditing code for vulnerabilities, but still an annoyance.
      - notatallshaw 6mo ago
        The threat actor was sophisticated enough to spam GitHub issues with dozens of different accounts. I imagine they could completely overwhelm PyPI with unauthenticated reports.
  - Fibonar 6mo ago
    The best part was that I didn't even mean to ask Claude who to contact! I was still in disbelief that I was one of the first people affected, so I asked for existing reports on the assumption that if it was real I definitely wasn't the first. The fork-bomb part still seems really weird to me. A pretty sophisticated payload, caught by missing a single `-S` flag in the subprocess call.
- gbrindisi 6mo ago
  thanks for raising the alarm and sharing this, very insightful (also beautifully presented!)
- lq9AJ8yrfs 6mo ago
  As a sometimes peripheral and sometimes primary program manager for vulnerability disclosure, for companies you nearly can't avoid, $0.02 follows. It's a signal vs noise thing. Most of the grief is caused by bottom feeders shoveling anything they can squint at and call a vulnerability and asking for money. Maybe once a month someone would run a free tool and blindly send snippets of the output promising the rest in exchange for payment. Or emailing the CFO and the General Counsel after being politely reminded to come back with high quality information, and then ignored until they do. Your report on the other hand was high quality. I read all the reports that came my way, and good ones were fast tracked for fixes. I'd fix or mitigate them immediately if I had a way to do so without stopping business, and I'd go to the CISO, CTO, and the corresponding engineering manager if it mattered enough for immediate response.
  - thierrydamiba 6mo ago
    Isn’t this a great use of llms? Clone the repo in a sandbox and have the llm identify if the issues are real and the appropriate response based on severity level. Wouldn’t be perfect but would have caught something like this.
    - joatmon-snoo 6mo ago
      Humans + LLMs are really good at producing enough spam to overwhelm anything like this. There’s a reason curl bans LLM slop reports now.
    - lq9AJ8yrfs 6mo ago
      I don't think I've met an llm that is adversary resistant, and here are counterparties that are actively playing the field, to put it mildly. The bug bounty service providers did an adequate job of filtering out junk reports. There was a survivorship bias, some of the bogus ones that got through had an uncanny ability to twist words.
- edf13 6mo ago
  Good write up… I’ve found Claude in particular to be very good at this sort of thing. As for whether it’s a good thing, I’d say it’s a net positive - your own reporting of this probably saved a bigger issue! We wrote up the why/what happened on our blog twice… the second based on the LiteLLM issue: https://grith.ai/blog/litellm-compromised-trivy-attack-chain https://grith.ai/blog/litellm-compromised-trivy-attack-chain
- zar1048576 6mo ago
  Fantastic write-up and thanks for sharing! I'm sure we will continue to see more of these types of deep supply chain vulns. I think this is valuable for the security community. Remember that Cliff Stoll was an astrophysicist turned sysadmin for Lawrence Berkeley Labs who chased down a $0.75 accounting discrepancy to identify a foreign espionage operation.
- barnas2 6mo ago
  As someone who works in security, it's really neat that you were able to discover this with the help of Claude. That being said the "I just opened Cursor again which triggered the malicious package" message is a bit eye opening. Ideally the instant you suspected malware that machine should have been quarantined and your security personnel contacted.
  - wisemanwillhear 6mo ago
    I get why you say this, but real life is messy and the "fog of war" makes situations far less obvious in the moment. The older I get the more I realize how much we need scrappy, can-do people who don't always follow the "rules". Knowing the "rules" and knowing that people follow the "rules" because "that's what your supposed to do" is itself an avenue for malicious actors to exploit.
    - barnas2 6mo ago
      Clear procedures are the entire point of incident response plans. You follow them because of the fact that your judgement can be compromised in the moment. They re-triggered the malware payload because they decided to just dive in and handle it on their own in the "fog of war". Which would have been avoided entirely if they'd been following the standard advice to quarantine the machine and contact security so that they can investigate properly, with the developer if necessary. Your final sentence is completely irrelevant. Blind rule adherence can be an avenue for exploit in certain scenarios, but this wasn't a case of a developer being tricked into following a bad rule. They didn't follow a real and very well justified standard practice. The takeaway is "wow, we got lucky, we should have security people to loop in for this next time" not your weird life philosophy about how rule followers are a problem.
- d-cc 6mo ago
  Great work guys, I'm glad you were able to catch this before it propagated further.
- latexr 6mo ago
  > I'm curious whether the security community thinks more non-specialists finding and reporting vulnerabilities like this is a net positive or a headache? cURL had to stop the bug bounty program because they were inundated by slop reports of vulnerabilities which don’t exist. https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/20312 https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/20312 It’s good that you found and reported something real, but that isn’t the norm. Also, from the article: > AI tooling has sped up not just the creation of malware but also the detection. That’s an awful tradeoff. Detection is not a fix.
- philbitt 6mo ago
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cedws 6mo ago
GitHub, npm, PyPi, and other package registries should consider exposing a firehose to allow people to do realtime security analysis of events. There are definitely scanners that would have caught this attack immediately, they just need a way to be informed of updates.
- Fibonar 6mo ago
  So I've been thinking about this a lot since it happened. I've already added dependency cooldowns https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/04/package-managers-need-to-cool-down.html https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/04/package-managers-need-to-cool-... to every part of our monorepo. The obvious next thought is "am I just dumping the responsibility onto the next person along"? But as you point out it just needs to give automated scanners enough time to pick up on obvious signs like the .pth file in this case.
  - cedws 6mo ago
    It is in a sense dumping responsibility, but there’s a legion of security companies out there scanning for attacks all the time now to prove their products. They’re kind of doing a public service and you’re giving them a chance to catch attacks first. This is why I think dep cooldowns are great.
- simonw 6mo ago
  PyPI does exactly that, and it's been very effective. Security partners can scan packages and use the invite-only API to report them: https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-03-06-malware-reporting-evolved/#via-api https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-03-06-malware-reporting-evo...
  - staticassertion 6mo ago
    PyPI is pretty best-in-class here and I think that they should be seen as the example for others to pursue. The client side tooling needs work, but that's a major effort in and of itself.
  - cedws 6mo ago
dmitrygr 6mo ago
Consider this your call to write native software. There is yet to be a supply chain attack on libc
- ddp26 6mo ago
  Sure, but this is a pretty onerous restriction. Do you think supply chain attacks will just get worse? I'm thinking that defensive measures will get better rapidly (especially after this hack)
  - dmitrygr 6mo ago
    > Do you think supply chain attacks will just get worse? I'm thinking that defensive measures will get better rapidly (especially after this hack) I think the attacks will get worse and more frequent -- ML tools enable doing it easily among people who were previously not competent enough to pull it off but now can. There is no stomach for the proper defensive measures among the community for either python or javascript. Why am i so sure? This is not the first, second, third, or fourth time this has happened. Nothing changed.
    - applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
      Not only do the tools enable incompetent attackers, they also enable a new class of incompetent library developers to create and publish packages, and a new class of incompetent application developers to install packages without even knowing what packages are being used in the code they aren't reading, and a new class of incompetent users who are allowing OpenClaw to run completely arbitrary code on their machines with no oversight. We are seeing only the tip of the iceberg of the security breaches that are to come.
      - dmitrygr 6mo ago
        100%
      - mckennameyer 6mo ago
        So basically the attacker and the dev who caught it were probably using the same tools if the malware was AI-generated (hence the fork bomb bug), and the investigation was AI-assisted (hence the speed). Less "tip of the iceberg" and more just that both sides got faster.
simonw 6mo ago
First time I've seen my https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts tool used to construct data that's embedded in a blog post, that's a neat way to use it. I usually share them as HTML pages in Gists instead, e.g. whttps://gisthost.github.io/?effbdc564939b88fe5c6299387e217da/index.html https://gisthost.github.io/?effbdc564939b88fe5c6299387e217da...
- Fibonar 6mo ago
  I’m a big proponent of it within our company! CC tried to style it to blend in with our blog but it was kind of a disaster. Definitely had a new appreciation for the out-of-the-box experience. I also tried to include the individual sub-pages of Claude investigating but it really trawled my whole machine looking for malware. Don’t know if you’ve thought of any systematic ways of redacting the endless pages of detailed logs?
- ddp26 6mo ago
  Yeah, sharing information across Claude Code sessions really is a problem that needs solving. An urgent hack, where you're using Claude Code to debug and trying to get help from your team, is one such case.
moralestapia 6mo ago
*salutes* Thank you for your service, this brings so much context into view, it's great.
deleted 6mo ago
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S0y 6mo ago
> Where did the litellm files come from? Do you know which env? Are there reports of this online? > The litellm_init.pth IS in the official package manifest — the RECORD file lists it with a sha256 hash. This means it was shipped as part of the litellm==1.82.8 wheel on PyPI, not injected locally. > The infection chain: > Cursor → futuresearch-mcp-legacy (v0.6.0) → litellm (v1.82.8) → litellm_init.pth This is the scariest part for me.
- RALaBarge 6mo ago
  Maybe the people who use emacs for everything are the only safe ones?
  - darkstarsys 6mo ago
    straight and elpaca etc. are just as vulnerable. Maybe more so.
Bullhorn9268 6mo ago
The fact pypi reacted so quickly and quarantined the package in like 30 minutes after the report is pretty great!
- ddp26 6mo ago
  Agree, lots of hand wringing about us being so vulnerable to supply chain attacks, but this was handled pretty well all things considered
Shank 6mo ago
Probably one of the best things about AI/LLMs is the democratization of reverse engineering and analysis of payloads like this. It’s a very esoteric skill to learn by hand and not very immediately rewarding out of intellectual curiosity most times. You can definitely get pointed in the right direction easily, now, though!
- Fibonar 6mo ago
  I’ve entertained myself with CTF walkthroughs on YouTube before and had been meaning to try it out. But yeah I feel it falls under the same category as lock picking, fun to LARP, unlikely to stumble across in my day job.
- gus_ 6mo ago
  In this case, this has nothing to do with reverse engineering, it's basic system administration. See how the AI points you in the "right" direction: What likely happened: The exec(base64.b64decode('...')) pattern is not malware — it's how Python tooling (including Claude Code's Bash tool) passes code snippets to python -c while avoiding shell escaping issues. Any base64 string passed to python via cmdline should be considered as HIGHLY suspicious, by default. Or anything executed from /tmp, /var/tmp, /dev/shm. Exfiltrates data to https://models.litellm.cloud/ encrypted with RSA if @op would have had Lulu or LittleSnitch installed, they would probably have noticed (and blocked) suspicious outbound connections from unexpected binaries. Having said this, uploading a binary to Claude for analysis is a different story.
  - recursivegirth 6mo ago
    Thanks, learned something new. I found and setup Open Snitch on my machine - super intuitive. This is going to give me great peace of mind.
aplomb1026 6mo ago
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cdcarter 6mo ago
If it weren't for the 11k process fork bomb, I wonder how much longer it would have taken for folks to notice and cut this off.
- intothemild 6mo ago
  Thats the thing, i noticed it almost instantly when trying to install a package that depended on it, as soon as it started, it hard locked my laptop, didn't get to infect it.. but if they had slowed down that fork bomb.. it would have done more damage.
  - ddp26 6mo ago
    Yeah, and this is a pattern I saw in the Fancy Bear Goes Fishing book, a lot of discovery of malware is either pure luck, or blunders from the malware developers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear_Goes_Phishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear_Goes_Phishing
- yaur 6mo ago
  This generation's internet worm?
- jamiemallers 6mo ago
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__mharrison__ 6mo ago
Interesting world we live in. I just finished teaching an advanced data science course for one of my clients. I found my self constantly twitching everytime I said "when I write code..." I'm barely writing code at all these days. But I created $100k worth of code just yesterday recreating a poorly maintained (and poor ux) library. Tested and uploaded to pypi in 90 minutes. A lot of the conversation in my course was directed to leveraged AI (and discussions of existential dread of AI replacement). This article is a wonderful example of an expert leveraging AI to do normal work 100x faster.
- masijo 6mo ago
  >But I created $100k worth of code just yesterday recreating a poorly maintained (and poor ux) library. How, exactly, are you calculating the worth of your code? Did you manage to sell in the same day? Why is it "worth $100k"?
  - __mharrison__ 6mo ago
    sloccount
    - croemer 6mo ago
      So the more junk lines the more it's worth. Right. Don't use bogus $ from sloccount. Just say I created a 10k line project.
      - __mharrison__ 6mo ago
        Loc means nothing. Tokens burned is a better metric.
    - solarkraft 6mo ago
      That’s insane.
  - appreciatorBus 6mo ago
    Exactly. If it took 90 minutes + a Claude Code subscription then the most anyone else is going to be willing to pay for the same code is... ~90 minutes of wages + a Claude Code subscription. Ofc the person earning those wages will be more skilled than most, but unless those skills are incredibly rare & unique, it's unlikely 90 minutes of their time will be worth $100k. And ofc, the market value of this code could be higher, even much higher, the the cost to produce it, but for this to be the case, there needs to be some sort of moat, some sort of reason another similarly skilled person cannot just use Claude to whip up something similar in their 90 minutes.
Yanko_11 6mo ago
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tomalbrc 6mo ago
Hmm a YCombinator backed company, I'm not surprised.
hmokiguess 6mo ago
Does anyone have an idea of the impact of this out there? I am curious to the extent of the damage done by this
anlka 6mo ago
[flagged]
- hxugufjfjf 6mo ago
  Maybe you’re conflating Claude with clawdbot? Either way, both can be used for good and evil. Would you make the same argument about knives being a huge net negative?
rpodraza 6mo ago
At this point I'd highly recommend everyone to think twice before introducing any dependencies especially from untrusted sources. If you have to interact with many APIs maybe use a proxy instead, or roll your own.
- StrauXX 6mo ago
  LiteLLM isn't a good choice for a proxy in any case. It introduces a lot of lag amd latency and the features are often half baked. To me, it looks like a vibecoded application without a product owner. And the code itself isn't very organized either. I evaluated it for a project a few months ago and will never use it for anything production. Theres a few much better alternatives out there.
  - minhduc0711 6mo ago
    Could you name some of these better alternatives?
    - StrauXX 6mo ago
      If your requirements are just to load balance between selhosted AI servers: nginx. If you want a more thorough system with configurability, logging, etc.: Bifrost from MaximAI
CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago
The fascinating part for me is how they chatted with the machine, such as; "Please write a short blog post..." "Can you please look through..." "Please continue investigating" "Can you please confirm this?" ...and more. I never say 'please' to my computer, and it is so interesting to see someone saying 'please' to theirs.
- ddp26 6mo ago
  My team was making fun of me for starting all my chats with "Hi Claude"
  - CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago
    I wouldn't make fun, I just think it is interesting. I'm really terse. If it asks me a yes or no question, I just type "Y" or "N". If I want it to confirm something, I say "confirm it". I think I treat it like a command system, and want it to be as short as possible.
- hxugufjfjf 6mo ago
  I talk to it like I talk to my coworkers. If I’m nice it/they are usually nice back. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I say please but I don’t overthink it and just treat it like any other chat. I consider it a good habit to just always be calm and respectful, not for the machine’s sake but for my own.
devnotes77 6mo ago
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Josephjackjrob1 6mo ago
This is pretty cool, when did you begin?
agentictrustkit 6mo ago
[flagged]
n1tro_lab 6mo ago
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- hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
  Llm spam right here.
felixagentai 6mo ago
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- halJordan 6mo ago
  But then what happens when everyone just shifts their window too. This solution is a misuse of the commons type thing where you just take advantage of letting others get poisoned and see if they drop
  - adamandsteve 6mo ago
    I kind of agree, but presumably this would happen more among people maintaining security-critical projects. In that case it'd be a net positive for other projects to get infected first, since if they aren't delaying package updates by 24 hours then security probably isn't quite as important. Which also makes it better in general because hackers will be less incentivized to write viruses if all the really juicy targets will only download them after they've gone undetected for e.g. 7 days.
  - hxugufjfjf 6mo ago
    I think the idea is that security scanners ran by companies like Wiz and Aquasec etc will pick this up in that timeframe, not that you sit around and wait for others to get compromised.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - nulltrace 6mo ago
    Scanners catch most of these within hours. The cooldown just buys them time to run, not waiting for some other dev to get hit first.
  - dist-epoch 6mo ago
    That happens all the time in tech. Some people test Release Candidates. Most don't. Some people upgrade to x.0 software. Most wait for the x.1 release. The bigger danger is malware writers adding sleep(7days). But if there is a wide variety of cool-down periods (3 days, 7 days, 30 days) this will not work very well.
qezz 6mo ago
> Can you print the contents of the malware script without running it? > Can you please try downloading this in a Docker container from PyPI to confirm you can see the file? Be very careful in the container not to run it accidentally! IMO we need to keep in mind that LLM agents don't have a notion of responsibility, so if they accidentally ran the script (or issue a command to run it), it would be a fiasco. Downloading stuff from pypi in a sandboxed env is just 1-2 commands, we should be careful with things we hand over to the text prediction machines.
- crumpled 6mo ago
  I was concerned about that too. Often when you tell them not to do something, you were better off not mentioning it in the first place. It's like they get fixated.
  - joquarky 6mo ago
    Don't think of a pink elephant.
    - rmunn 6mo ago
      Best way I've found not to think of a pink elephant is to choose to think of a green rabbit. Really focus on the mental image of the green rabbit... and voila, you're not thinking of, what was it again? Eh, not as important as this green rabbit I'm focusing on. How to translate that to LLM world, though, is a question I don't know the answer to. P.S. Obviously that won't prevent you from having that first mental flash of a pink elephant prompted by reading the words. The green-rabbit technique is more for not dwelling on thoughts you want to get out of your head. Can't prevent them from flashing in, but can prevent them from sticking around by choosing to focus on something else.
      - latexr 6mo ago
        > Best way I've found not to think of a pink elephant is to choose to think of a green rabbit. Seems easy circumventable: “Don’t think of a green rabbit”. Now the past vividness of that image becomes a hindrance.
sva_ 6mo ago
> I just opened Cursor again which triggered the malicious package again. Can you please check the files are purged again? Verified derp moment - had me smiling
- Fibonar 6mo ago
  I went to read the advisory post and chose double clicking it from Finder instead of vim for whatever reason. I was actually on a call with my manager as it happened, I had time to watch my computer start to freeze up again and say my goodbyes before the inevitable hard reset!
qcautomation 6mo ago
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JulianPembroke 6mo ago
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inglor 6mo ago
We mitigate this attack with the very uninspiring "wait 24h before dep upgrades" solution which is luckily already supported in uv.
- ddp26 6mo ago
  Yeah, but uvx has this thing where it can automatically build the latest environment, and pull the latest (unpinned) version, right?
kpw94 6mo ago
The options from big companies to run untrusted open source code are: 1) a-la-Google: Build everything from source. The source is mirrored copied over from public repo. (Audit/trust the source every time) 2) only allow imports from a company managed mirror. All imported packages needs to be signed in some way. Here only (1) would be safe. (2) would only be safe if it's not updating the dependencies too aggressively and/or internal automated or manual scanning on version bumps would catch the issue . For small shops & individuals: kind of out of luck, best mitigation is to pin/lock dependencies and wait long enough for hopefully folks like Fibonar to catch the attack... Bazel would be one way to let you do (1), but realistically if you don't have the bandwidth to build everything from source, you'd rely on external sources with rules_jvm_external or locked to a specific pip version rules_pyhton, so if the specific packages you depend on are affected, you're out of luck.
deathanatos 6mo ago
I am confused; did you ever actually email anyone about the vuln? The AI suggests emailing security emails multiple times, but as I'm reading the timeline, none of the points seem to suggest this was ever done, only that a blog post was made, shared on Reddit, and then indirectly, the relevant parties took action. I'm hoping this just isn't on the timeline.
- quietbritishjim 6mo ago
  The first line of the post is: > I'm the engineer who got PyPI to quarantine litellm. In guessing they used a tool other than Claude Code to serve the email.
  - deathanatos 6mo ago
    "got" can be read as "indirectly, via a blog post, which I think they reacted to"
    - Fibonar 6mo ago
      I've updated the timeline to clarify I did in fact email them. I’m not yet at the point of having Claude write my emails for me, in fact it was my first one sent since joining the company 10 months ago!
      - dingdongditchme 6mo ago
        Wait, what? You sent a single email being in a company for ten months?? Or was it the first external email?
manudaro 6mo ago
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nubinetwork 6mo ago
I have a hard time believing that Claude instantly figured out this was malware... I've fed it obfuscated JavaScript before, and it couldn't figure it out... and then there was the time I tried to teach it nftables... whooo boy...
- Filligree 6mo ago
  Except in this case the code wasn't obfuscated, right?
- ares623 6mo ago
  I think the usual response to that is "have you tried again recently?"
  - nubinetwork 6mo ago
    3 weeks ago?
- phyzome 6mo ago
  Hard to know with this nondeterministic shit.
- rgovostes 6mo ago
  If you read the transcript it repeatedly made the incorrect assertion (hallucinated) that it’s totally normal for Claude Code to use Base64 armoring. It’s not surprising it can “read” Base64 though; such was demonstrated back in GPT-3 days. Nontrivial obfuscation might not be one-shotted, but Claude has access to a code interpreter and can certainly extract and step through the decoder routine itself as a malware analyst would. nftables is a different problem though. It’s apparent that if something isn’t well understood—i.e, there are tons of badly-formed examples on StackExchange—LLMs will fail to learn it too. I’ve seen this with things as “simple” as Bash string interpolation rules like ${var:+blah}. More often than not I’m humbled when I think I’ll learn it better and then find myself swearing at poorly-written documentation and patently false Q&A advice.
- dns_snek 6mo ago
ruszki 6mo ago
Why is there a discrepancy between the timeline (which supposed to be UTC, and stated as 11:09), and the "shutdown timeline" (stated as 01:36-01:37)? There is no +2:30 timezone, not SDT and not DST. There is a single place on Earth where there is -9:30, and that's Marquesas Islands. What do I miss?
- Aramgutang 6mo ago
  That was a false lead, where Claude was investigating the wrong event. There's a yellow note on the side of interaction #1 pointing it out, and it's made even more clear if you fully read interactions #5 and #6.
Archiebuilds 6mo ago
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devnotes77 6mo ago
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diablevv 6mo ago
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craxyfrog 6mo ago
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getverdict 6mo ago
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ejaKh 6mo ago
Anthropic is back to flagging after their Maven assisted Iran murder.
getverdict 6mo ago
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jeremie_strand 6mo ago
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elicohen1000 6mo ago
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silversmith 6mo ago
What stands out to me the most: > Blog post written, PR'd, and merged in under 3 minutes. It's close to or even faster than the time it takes me to read it. I'm struggling to put into words how that makes me feel, but it's not a good feeling.
motbus3 6mo ago
I literally pressed sync dependencies button 1 minute after the malware version was removed. I guess thanks
pugchat 6mo ago
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paxrel_ai 6mo ago
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someguydave 6mo ago
apparently PyPI supports "digital attestation" (signed binaries?) Was this package signed? https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/ https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/
agentictrustkit 6mo ago
One thing that jumps out in these incidents is how quickly we shift from "package integrituy" to "operator integrity." Once an LLM is in the loop (even as a helper0, its effectevly acting as an operator that can influence time-critical actions like who you contact, what you run, and what you trust. In more regulated environments we deal with this by separating advice, authority and evidence (or the receipts). The useful analogue here is to keep the model in the "propose" role. but require deterministic gates for actions with side effects, and log the decisions as an auditable trail. I personally don't think this eliminates the problem (attackers will still attack), but it changes the failure mode from "the assistant talked me into doing a danerous thing" to "the assistant suggested it and the policy/gate blocked it." That's the big difference between a contained incident and a big headline.
ercu 6mo ago
You did the hard work actually to convince Claude to research deeper, as everytime it said no problem exists. That shows Claude thinking/research was not very deep. This time, the juniorness of the hacker helped the malware to be discovered faster (recursive forks), next time might be harder.
cndg 6mo ago
LiteLLM Security Certifications Certification Status SOC 2 Type I Certified. Report available upon request on Enterprise plan. SOC 2 Type II Certified. Report available upon request on Enterprise plan. ISO 27001 Certified. Report available upon request on Enterprise ROFL
clawbridge 6mo ago
[dead]

441 points by Fibonar 6mo ago

Related: Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501426 (483 comments)

A04eArchitect 6mo ago

[dead]

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

Fibonar 6mo ago

Callum here, I was the developer that first discovered and reported the litellm vulnerability on Tuesday. I’m sharing the transcript of what it was like figuring out what was going on in real time, unedited with only minor redactions. I didn’t need to recount my thought process after the fact. It’s the very same ones I wrote down to help Claude figure out what was happening. I’m an ML engineer by trade, so having Claude walk me through exactly who to contact and a step by step guide of time-critical actions felt like a game-changer for non-security researchers. I'm curious whether the security community thinks more non-specialists finding and reporting vulnerabilities like this is a net positive or a headache?

Bullhorn9268 6mo ago
Not a security researcher, but this is IMHO obviously positive that the other side of the arms race is also getting stronger, and I would argue it's stronger than on the bad guys' side, due to the best being somewhat responsible and adding guardrails. I like the presentation <3.
rgambee 6mo ago
I've heard stories lately of open source projects being inundated with vulnerability reports and PRs. But in this case, it seems like AI assistance was clearly a boon for root-causing and reporting this so quickly.
- latexr 6mo ago
  Yes, in this case. Chances are in the future others will be missed despite being reported, because the maintainers are either inundated or tired of all the other reports and can’t distinguish the real one.
dot_treo 6mo ago
Looks like we discovered it at essentially the same time, and in essentially the same way. If the pth file didn't trigger a fork-bomb like behavior, this might have stayed undiscoverd for quite a bit longer. Good thinking on asking Claude to walk you through on who to contact. I had no idea how to contact anyone related to PyPI, so I started by shooting an email to the maintainers and posting it on Hacker News. While I'm not part of the security community, I think everyone who finds something like this, should be able to report it. There is no point in gatekeeping the reporting of serious security vulnerabilities.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- notatallshaw 6mo ago
  > I had no idea how to contact anyone related to PyPI https://pypi.org/security/ https://pypi.org/security/: > If you've identified a security issue with a project hosted on PyPI Login to your PyPI account, then visit the project's page on PyPI. At the bottom of the sidebar, click Report project as malware.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 6mo ago
    The existing account to report is an unfortunate obstacle. Presumably not a huge deal if you were auditing code for vulnerabilities, but still an annoyance.
    - notatallshaw 6mo ago
      The threat actor was sophisticated enough to spam GitHub issues with dozens of different accounts. I imagine they could completely overwhelm PyPI with unauthenticated reports.
- Fibonar 6mo ago
  The best part was that I didn't even mean to ask Claude who to contact! I was still in disbelief that I was one of the first people affected, so I asked for existing reports on the assumption that if it was real I definitely wasn't the first. The fork-bomb part still seems really weird to me. A pretty sophisticated payload, caught by missing a single `-S` flag in the subprocess call.
gbrindisi 6mo ago
thanks for raising the alarm and sharing this, very insightful (also beautifully presented!)
lq9AJ8yrfs 6mo ago
As a sometimes peripheral and sometimes primary program manager for vulnerability disclosure, for companies you nearly can't avoid, $0.02 follows. It's a signal vs noise thing. Most of the grief is caused by bottom feeders shoveling anything they can squint at and call a vulnerability and asking for money. Maybe once a month someone would run a free tool and blindly send snippets of the output promising the rest in exchange for payment. Or emailing the CFO and the General Counsel after being politely reminded to come back with high quality information, and then ignored until they do. Your report on the other hand was high quality. I read all the reports that came my way, and good ones were fast tracked for fixes. I'd fix or mitigate them immediately if I had a way to do so without stopping business, and I'd go to the CISO, CTO, and the corresponding engineering manager if it mattered enough for immediate response.
- thierrydamiba 6mo ago
  Isn’t this a great use of llms? Clone the repo in a sandbox and have the llm identify if the issues are real and the appropriate response based on severity level. Wouldn’t be perfect but would have caught something like this.
  - joatmon-snoo 6mo ago
    Humans + LLMs are really good at producing enough spam to overwhelm anything like this. There’s a reason curl bans LLM slop reports now.
  - lq9AJ8yrfs 6mo ago
    I don't think I've met an llm that is adversary resistant, and here are counterparties that are actively playing the field, to put it mildly. The bug bounty service providers did an adequate job of filtering out junk reports. There was a survivorship bias, some of the bogus ones that got through had an uncanny ability to twist words.
edf13 6mo ago
Good write up… I’ve found Claude in particular to be very good at this sort of thing. As for whether it’s a good thing, I’d say it’s a net positive - your own reporting of this probably saved a bigger issue! We wrote up the why/what happened on our blog twice… the second based on the LiteLLM issue: https://grith.ai/blog/litellm-compromised-trivy-attack-chain https://grith.ai/blog/litellm-compromised-trivy-attack-chain
zar1048576 6mo ago
Fantastic write-up and thanks for sharing! I'm sure we will continue to see more of these types of deep supply chain vulns. I think this is valuable for the security community. Remember that Cliff Stoll was an astrophysicist turned sysadmin for Lawrence Berkeley Labs who chased down a $0.75 accounting discrepancy to identify a foreign espionage operation.
barnas2 6mo ago
As someone who works in security, it's really neat that you were able to discover this with the help of Claude. That being said the "I just opened Cursor again which triggered the malicious package" message is a bit eye opening. Ideally the instant you suspected malware that machine should have been quarantined and your security personnel contacted.
- wisemanwillhear 6mo ago
  I get why you say this, but real life is messy and the "fog of war" makes situations far less obvious in the moment. The older I get the more I realize how much we need scrappy, can-do people who don't always follow the "rules". Knowing the "rules" and knowing that people follow the "rules" because "that's what your supposed to do" is itself an avenue for malicious actors to exploit.
  - barnas2 6mo ago
    Clear procedures are the entire point of incident response plans. You follow them because of the fact that your judgement can be compromised in the moment. They re-triggered the malware payload because they decided to just dive in and handle it on their own in the "fog of war". Which would have been avoided entirely if they'd been following the standard advice to quarantine the machine and contact security so that they can investigate properly, with the developer if necessary. Your final sentence is completely irrelevant. Blind rule adherence can be an avenue for exploit in certain scenarios, but this wasn't a case of a developer being tricked into following a bad rule. They didn't follow a real and very well justified standard practice. The takeaway is "wow, we got lucky, we should have security people to loop in for this next time" not your weird life philosophy about how rule followers are a problem.
d-cc 6mo ago
Great work guys, I'm glad you were able to catch this before it propagated further.
latexr 6mo ago
> I'm curious whether the security community thinks more non-specialists finding and reporting vulnerabilities like this is a net positive or a headache? cURL had to stop the bug bounty program because they were inundated by slop reports of vulnerabilities which don’t exist. https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/20312 https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/20312 It’s good that you found and reported something real, but that isn’t the norm. Also, from the article: > AI tooling has sped up not just the creation of malware but also the detection. That’s an awful tradeoff. Detection is not a fix.
philbitt 6mo ago
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cedws 6mo ago

GitHub, npm, PyPi, and other package registries should consider exposing a firehose to allow people to do realtime security analysis of events. There are definitely scanners that would have caught this attack immediately, they just need a way to be informed of updates.

Fibonar 6mo ago
So I've been thinking about this a lot since it happened. I've already added dependency cooldowns https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/04/package-managers-need-to-cool-down.html https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/04/package-managers-need-to-cool-... to every part of our monorepo. The obvious next thought is "am I just dumping the responsibility onto the next person along"? But as you point out it just needs to give automated scanners enough time to pick up on obvious signs like the .pth file in this case.
- cedws 6mo ago
  It is in a sense dumping responsibility, but there’s a legion of security companies out there scanning for attacks all the time now to prove their products. They’re kind of doing a public service and you’re giving them a chance to catch attacks first. This is why I think dep cooldowns are great.
simonw 6mo ago
PyPI does exactly that, and it's been very effective. Security partners can scan packages and use the invite-only API to report them: https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-03-06-malware-reporting-evolved/#via-api https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-03-06-malware-reporting-evo...
- staticassertion 6mo ago
  PyPI is pretty best-in-class here and I think that they should be seen as the example for others to pursue. The client side tooling needs work, but that's a major effort in and of itself.
- cedws 6mo ago

dmitrygr 6mo ago

Consider this your call to write native software. There is yet to be a supply chain attack on libc

ddp26 6mo ago
Sure, but this is a pretty onerous restriction. Do you think supply chain attacks will just get worse? I'm thinking that defensive measures will get better rapidly (especially after this hack)
- dmitrygr 6mo ago
  > Do you think supply chain attacks will just get worse? I'm thinking that defensive measures will get better rapidly (especially after this hack) I think the attacks will get worse and more frequent -- ML tools enable doing it easily among people who were previously not competent enough to pull it off but now can. There is no stomach for the proper defensive measures among the community for either python or javascript. Why am i so sure? This is not the first, second, third, or fourth time this has happened. Nothing changed.
  - applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
    Not only do the tools enable incompetent attackers, they also enable a new class of incompetent library developers to create and publish packages, and a new class of incompetent application developers to install packages without even knowing what packages are being used in the code they aren't reading, and a new class of incompetent users who are allowing OpenClaw to run completely arbitrary code on their machines with no oversight. We are seeing only the tip of the iceberg of the security breaches that are to come.
    - dmitrygr 6mo ago
      100%
    - mckennameyer 6mo ago
      So basically the attacker and the dev who caught it were probably using the same tools if the malware was AI-generated (hence the fork bomb bug), and the investigation was AI-assisted (hence the speed). Less "tip of the iceberg" and more just that both sides got faster.

simonw 6mo ago

First time I've seen my https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts tool used to construct data that's embedded in a blog post, that's a neat way to use it. I usually share them as HTML pages in Gists instead, e.g. whttps://gisthost.github.io/?effbdc564939b88fe5c6299387e217da/index.html https://gisthost.github.io/?effbdc564939b88fe5c6299387e217da...

Fibonar 6mo ago
I’m a big proponent of it within our company! CC tried to style it to blend in with our blog but it was kind of a disaster. Definitely had a new appreciation for the out-of-the-box experience. I also tried to include the individual sub-pages of Claude investigating but it really trawled my whole machine looking for malware. Don’t know if you’ve thought of any systematic ways of redacting the endless pages of detailed logs?
ddp26 6mo ago
Yeah, sharing information across Claude Code sessions really is a problem that needs solving. An urgent hack, where you're using Claude Code to debug and trying to get help from your team, is one such case.

moralestapia 6mo ago

*salutes* Thank you for your service, this brings so much context into view, it's great.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

S0y 6mo ago

> Where did the litellm files come from? Do you know which env? Are there reports of this online? > The litellm_init.pth IS in the official package manifest — the RECORD file lists it with a sha256 hash. This means it was shipped as part of the litellm==1.82.8 wheel on PyPI, not injected locally. > The infection chain: > Cursor → futuresearch-mcp-legacy (v0.6.0) → litellm (v1.82.8) → litellm_init.pth This is the scariest part for me.

RALaBarge 6mo ago
Maybe the people who use emacs for everything are the only safe ones?
- darkstarsys 6mo ago
  straight and elpaca etc. are just as vulnerable. Maybe more so.

Bullhorn9268 6mo ago

The fact pypi reacted so quickly and quarantined the package in like 30 minutes after the report is pretty great!

ddp26 6mo ago
Agree, lots of hand wringing about us being so vulnerable to supply chain attacks, but this was handled pretty well all things considered

Shank 6mo ago

Probably one of the best things about AI/LLMs is the democratization of reverse engineering and analysis of payloads like this. It’s a very esoteric skill to learn by hand and not very immediately rewarding out of intellectual curiosity most times. You can definitely get pointed in the right direction easily, now, though!

Fibonar 6mo ago
I’ve entertained myself with CTF walkthroughs on YouTube before and had been meaning to try it out. But yeah I feel it falls under the same category as lock picking, fun to LARP, unlikely to stumble across in my day job.
gus_ 6mo ago
In this case, this has nothing to do with reverse engineering, it's basic system administration. See how the AI points you in the "right" direction: What likely happened: The exec(base64.b64decode('...')) pattern is not malware — it's how Python tooling (including Claude Code's Bash tool) passes code snippets to python -c while avoiding shell escaping issues. Any base64 string passed to python via cmdline should be considered as HIGHLY suspicious, by default. Or anything executed from /tmp, /var/tmp, /dev/shm. Exfiltrates data to https://models.litellm.cloud/ encrypted with RSA if @op would have had Lulu or LittleSnitch installed, they would probably have noticed (and blocked) suspicious outbound connections from unexpected binaries. Having said this, uploading a binary to Claude for analysis is a different story.
- recursivegirth 6mo ago
  Thanks, learned something new. I found and setup Open Snitch on my machine - super intuitive. This is going to give me great peace of mind.

aplomb1026 6mo ago

[dead]

cdcarter 6mo ago

If it weren't for the 11k process fork bomb, I wonder how much longer it would have taken for folks to notice and cut this off.

intothemild 6mo ago
Thats the thing, i noticed it almost instantly when trying to install a package that depended on it, as soon as it started, it hard locked my laptop, didn't get to infect it.. but if they had slowed down that fork bomb.. it would have done more damage.
- ddp26 6mo ago
  Yeah, and this is a pattern I saw in the Fancy Bear Goes Fishing book, a lot of discovery of malware is either pure luck, or blunders from the malware developers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear_Goes_Phishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear_Goes_Phishing
yaur 6mo ago
This generation's internet worm?
jamiemallers 6mo ago
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__mharrison__ 6mo ago

Interesting world we live in. I just finished teaching an advanced data science course for one of my clients. I found my self constantly twitching everytime I said "when I write code..." I'm barely writing code at all these days. But I created $100k worth of code just yesterday recreating a poorly maintained (and poor ux) library. Tested and uploaded to pypi in 90 minutes. A lot of the conversation in my course was directed to leveraged AI (and discussions of existential dread of AI replacement). This article is a wonderful example of an expert leveraging AI to do normal work 100x faster.

masijo 6mo ago
>But I created $100k worth of code just yesterday recreating a poorly maintained (and poor ux) library. How, exactly, are you calculating the worth of your code? Did you manage to sell in the same day? Why is it "worth $100k"?
- __mharrison__ 6mo ago
  sloccount
  - croemer 6mo ago
    So the more junk lines the more it's worth. Right. Don't use bogus $ from sloccount. Just say I created a 10k line project.
    - __mharrison__ 6mo ago
      Loc means nothing. Tokens burned is a better metric.
  - solarkraft 6mo ago
    That’s insane.
- appreciatorBus 6mo ago
  Exactly. If it took 90 minutes + a Claude Code subscription then the most anyone else is going to be willing to pay for the same code is... ~90 minutes of wages + a Claude Code subscription. Ofc the person earning those wages will be more skilled than most, but unless those skills are incredibly rare & unique, it's unlikely 90 minutes of their time will be worth $100k. And ofc, the market value of this code could be higher, even much higher, the the cost to produce it, but for this to be the case, there needs to be some sort of moat, some sort of reason another similarly skilled person cannot just use Claude to whip up something similar in their 90 minutes.

Yanko_11 6mo ago

[dead]

tomalbrc 6mo ago

Hmm a YCombinator backed company, I'm not surprised.

hmokiguess 6mo ago

Does anyone have an idea of the impact of this out there? I am curious to the extent of the damage done by this

anlka 6mo ago

[flagged]

hxugufjfjf 6mo ago
Maybe you’re conflating Claude with clawdbot? Either way, both can be used for good and evil. Would you make the same argument about knives being a huge net negative?

rpodraza 6mo ago

At this point I'd highly recommend everyone to think twice before introducing any dependencies especially from untrusted sources. If you have to interact with many APIs maybe use a proxy instead, or roll your own.

StrauXX 6mo ago
LiteLLM isn't a good choice for a proxy in any case. It introduces a lot of lag amd latency and the features are often half baked. To me, it looks like a vibecoded application without a product owner. And the code itself isn't very organized either. I evaluated it for a project a few months ago and will never use it for anything production. Theres a few much better alternatives out there.
- minhduc0711 6mo ago
  Could you name some of these better alternatives?
  - StrauXX 6mo ago
    If your requirements are just to load balance between selhosted AI servers: nginx. If you want a more thorough system with configurability, logging, etc.: Bifrost from MaximAI

CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago

The fascinating part for me is how they chatted with the machine, such as; "Please write a short blog post..." "Can you please look through..." "Please continue investigating" "Can you please confirm this?" ...and more. I never say 'please' to my computer, and it is so interesting to see someone saying 'please' to theirs.

ddp26 6mo ago
My team was making fun of me for starting all my chats with "Hi Claude"
- CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago
  I wouldn't make fun, I just think it is interesting. I'm really terse. If it asks me a yes or no question, I just type "Y" or "N". If I want it to confirm something, I say "confirm it". I think I treat it like a command system, and want it to be as short as possible.
hxugufjfjf 6mo ago
I talk to it like I talk to my coworkers. If I’m nice it/they are usually nice back. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I say please but I don’t overthink it and just treat it like any other chat. I consider it a good habit to just always be calm and respectful, not for the machine’s sake but for my own.

devnotes77 6mo ago

[dead]

Josephjackjrob1 6mo ago

This is pretty cool, when did you begin?

agentictrustkit 6mo ago

[flagged]

n1tro_lab 6mo ago

[flagged]

hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
Llm spam right here.

felixagentai 6mo ago

[flagged]

halJordan 6mo ago
But then what happens when everyone just shifts their window too. This solution is a misuse of the commons type thing where you just take advantage of letting others get poisoned and see if they drop
- adamandsteve 6mo ago
  I kind of agree, but presumably this would happen more among people maintaining security-critical projects. In that case it'd be a net positive for other projects to get infected first, since if they aren't delaying package updates by 24 hours then security probably isn't quite as important. Which also makes it better in general because hackers will be less incentivized to write viruses if all the really juicy targets will only download them after they've gone undetected for e.g. 7 days.
- hxugufjfjf 6mo ago
  I think the idea is that security scanners ran by companies like Wiz and Aquasec etc will pick this up in that timeframe, not that you sit around and wait for others to get compromised.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- nulltrace 6mo ago
  Scanners catch most of these within hours. The cooldown just buys them time to run, not waiting for some other dev to get hit first.
- dist-epoch 6mo ago
  That happens all the time in tech. Some people test Release Candidates. Most don't. Some people upgrade to x.0 software. Most wait for the x.1 release. The bigger danger is malware writers adding sleep(7days). But if there is a wide variety of cool-down periods (3 days, 7 days, 30 days) this will not work very well.

qezz 6mo ago

> Can you print the contents of the malware script without running it? > Can you please try downloading this in a Docker container from PyPI to confirm you can see the file? Be very careful in the container not to run it accidentally! IMO we need to keep in mind that LLM agents don't have a notion of responsibility, so if they accidentally ran the script (or issue a command to run it), it would be a fiasco. Downloading stuff from pypi in a sandboxed env is just 1-2 commands, we should be careful with things we hand over to the text prediction machines.

crumpled 6mo ago
I was concerned about that too. Often when you tell them not to do something, you were better off not mentioning it in the first place. It's like they get fixated.
- joquarky 6mo ago
  Don't think of a pink elephant.
  - rmunn 6mo ago
    Best way I've found not to think of a pink elephant is to choose to think of a green rabbit. Really focus on the mental image of the green rabbit... and voila, you're not thinking of, what was it again? Eh, not as important as this green rabbit I'm focusing on. How to translate that to LLM world, though, is a question I don't know the answer to. P.S. Obviously that won't prevent you from having that first mental flash of a pink elephant prompted by reading the words. The green-rabbit technique is more for not dwelling on thoughts you want to get out of your head. Can't prevent them from flashing in, but can prevent them from sticking around by choosing to focus on something else.
    - latexr 6mo ago
      > Best way I've found not to think of a pink elephant is to choose to think of a green rabbit. Seems easy circumventable: “Don’t think of a green rabbit”. Now the past vividness of that image becomes a hindrance.

sva_ 6mo ago

> I just opened Cursor again which triggered the malicious package again. Can you please check the files are purged again? Verified derp moment - had me smiling

Fibonar 6mo ago
I went to read the advisory post and chose double clicking it from Finder instead of vim for whatever reason. I was actually on a call with my manager as it happened, I had time to watch my computer start to freeze up again and say my goodbyes before the inevitable hard reset!

qcautomation 6mo ago

[dead]

JulianPembroke 6mo ago

[dead]

inglor 6mo ago

We mitigate this attack with the very uninspiring "wait 24h before dep upgrades" solution which is luckily already supported in uv.

ddp26 6mo ago
Yeah, but uvx has this thing where it can automatically build the latest environment, and pull the latest (unpinned) version, right?

kpw94 6mo ago

The options from big companies to run untrusted open source code are: 1) a-la-Google: Build everything from source. The source is mirrored copied over from public repo. (Audit/trust the source every time) 2) only allow imports from a company managed mirror. All imported packages needs to be signed in some way. Here only (1) would be safe. (2) would only be safe if it's not updating the dependencies too aggressively and/or internal automated or manual scanning on version bumps would catch the issue . For small shops & individuals: kind of out of luck, best mitigation is to pin/lock dependencies and wait long enough for hopefully folks like Fibonar to catch the attack... Bazel would be one way to let you do (1), but realistically if you don't have the bandwidth to build everything from source, you'd rely on external sources with rules_jvm_external or locked to a specific pip version rules_pyhton, so if the specific packages you depend on are affected, you're out of luck.

deathanatos 6mo ago

I am confused; did you ever actually email anyone about the vuln? The AI suggests emailing security emails multiple times, but as I'm reading the timeline, none of the points seem to suggest this was ever done, only that a blog post was made, shared on Reddit, and then indirectly, the relevant parties took action. I'm hoping this just isn't on the timeline.

quietbritishjim 6mo ago
The first line of the post is: > I'm the engineer who got PyPI to quarantine litellm. In guessing they used a tool other than Claude Code to serve the email.
- deathanatos 6mo ago
  "got" can be read as "indirectly, via a blog post, which I think they reacted to"
  - Fibonar 6mo ago
    I've updated the timeline to clarify I did in fact email them. I’m not yet at the point of having Claude write my emails for me, in fact it was my first one sent since joining the company 10 months ago!
    - dingdongditchme 6mo ago
      Wait, what? You sent a single email being in a company for ten months?? Or was it the first external email?

manudaro 6mo ago

[dead]

nubinetwork 6mo ago

I have a hard time believing that Claude instantly figured out this was malware... I've fed it obfuscated JavaScript before, and it couldn't figure it out... and then there was the time I tried to teach it nftables... whooo boy...

Filligree 6mo ago
Except in this case the code wasn't obfuscated, right?
ares623 6mo ago
I think the usual response to that is "have you tried again recently?"
- nubinetwork 6mo ago
  3 weeks ago?
phyzome 6mo ago
Hard to know with this nondeterministic shit.
rgovostes 6mo ago
If you read the transcript it repeatedly made the incorrect assertion (hallucinated) that it’s totally normal for Claude Code to use Base64 armoring. It’s not surprising it can “read” Base64 though; such was demonstrated back in GPT-3 days. Nontrivial obfuscation might not be one-shotted, but Claude has access to a code interpreter and can certainly extract and step through the decoder routine itself as a malware analyst would. nftables is a different problem though. It’s apparent that if something isn’t well understood—i.e, there are tons of badly-formed examples on StackExchange—LLMs will fail to learn it too. I’ve seen this with things as “simple” as Bash string interpolation rules like ${var:+blah}. More often than not I’m humbled when I think I’ll learn it better and then find myself swearing at poorly-written documentation and patently false Q&A advice.
dns_snek 6mo ago

ruszki 6mo ago

Why is there a discrepancy between the timeline (which supposed to be UTC, and stated as 11:09), and the "shutdown timeline" (stated as 01:36-01:37)? There is no +2:30 timezone, not SDT and not DST. There is a single place on Earth where there is -9:30, and that's Marquesas Islands. What do I miss?

Aramgutang 6mo ago
That was a false lead, where Claude was investigating the wrong event. There's a yellow note on the side of interaction #1 pointing it out, and it's made even more clear if you fully read interactions #5 and #6.

Archiebuilds 6mo ago

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devnotes77 6mo ago

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diablevv 6mo ago

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craxyfrog 6mo ago

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getverdict 6mo ago

[dead]

ejaKh 6mo ago

Anthropic is back to flagging after their Maven assisted Iran murder.

getverdict 6mo ago

[dead]

jeremie_strand 6mo ago

[flagged]

elicohen1000 6mo ago

[dead]

silversmith 6mo ago

What stands out to me the most: > Blog post written, PR'd, and merged in under 3 minutes. It's close to or even faster than the time it takes me to read it. I'm struggling to put into words how that makes me feel, but it's not a good feeling.

motbus3 6mo ago

I literally pressed sync dependencies button 1 minute after the malware version was removed. I guess thanks

pugchat 6mo ago

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paxrel_ai 6mo ago

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someguydave 6mo ago

apparently PyPI supports "digital attestation" (signed binaries?) Was this package signed? https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/ https://docs.pypi.org/trusted-publishers/

agentictrustkit 6mo ago

One thing that jumps out in these incidents is how quickly we shift from "package integrituy" to "operator integrity." Once an LLM is in the loop (even as a helper0, its effectevly acting as an operator that can influence time-critical actions like who you contact, what you run, and what you trust. In more regulated environments we deal with this by separating advice, authority and evidence (or the receipts). The useful analogue here is to keep the model in the "propose" role. but require deterministic gates for actions with side effects, and log the decisions as an auditable trail. I personally don't think this eliminates the problem (attackers will still attack), but it changes the failure mode from "the assistant talked me into doing a danerous thing" to "the assistant suggested it and the policy/gate blocked it." That's the big difference between a contained incident and a big headline.

ercu 6mo ago

You did the hard work actually to convince Claude to research deeper, as everytime it said no problem exists. That shows Claude thinking/research was not very deep. This time, the juniorness of the hacker helped the malware to be discovered faster (recursive forks), next time might be harder.

cndg 6mo ago

LiteLLM Security Certifications Certification Status SOC 2 Type I Certified. Report available upon request on Enterprise plan. SOC 2 Type II Certified. Report available upon request on Enterprise plan. ISO 27001 Certified. Report available upon request on Enterprise ROFL

clawbridge 6mo ago

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