A bad day to use python

I have a story for you you just you you might not even believe. Okay, this story is like an might Shyamalan movie. Okay, there's going to be turn after turn after turn. We got three big ones and the final one, honestly, I'm still kind of tickled by it. I barely laughed when I saw it. I didn't even believe it. I said, "Nope, this has to be fake news." And in fact, it was not fake news. One of the biggest Python packages that gets downloaded 97 million times a month has just been compromised. And when I say compromised, what ends up happening is that if you launch any Python process, you will get everything taken from your computer. I'm talking about every last item. SSH keys, AWS, GCP, Azareware, Kreds, Kubernetes, configs, git credentials, environment variables, shell history, crypto wallets, SSL, private keys, CI/CD, secrets, database passwords. We're talking about everything. This vulnerability treated your tokens like Pokemon. Okay, they caught actually all of them. All right, before we get to the Might Shyamalan stuff, we got to do a little bit of that meat and potatoes. Little reading of the friendly manual. What actually happened here? Well, there is a company called Light LLM. And they provide kind of like this nice little uniform layer to be able to request all the other LLMs. know they saw these 14 different standards and decided if they developed a 15th standard they would make universal access and everything would be better. Somehow the owner of the light LLM GitHub repository got compromised and the hackers were able to push out a version of software that contained this Xfiltration code. So now we're going to start getting into some of the fun might Shimamlan territory. So, number one, Andre Kaparthy, the one who coined the term vibe coding, claims that the reason why this hack failed, vibe coding. Now, there's actually no evidence for this, but if this were true, this would be the happiest day. This would be the best day in the universe. Okay, this would be so dang funny if that was true. Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in Light LLM as a transitive dependency. That's right. You don't actually have to install it yourself. If any program you use also installs it, you also get had. And that is because it takes over a special file in Python called aptth file. Which means when the Python interpreter starts up, it executes this file. And upon executing that file, it actually goes out and grabs all your credentials. Doublebase 64 encodes it and tosses it up to a server. By the way, double base 64 encoding, that's double based. Okay, that is the classic hacker signature. When light LLM 1.82.8 8 installed. Their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. It turns out that little PTH file, apparently it spawns itself over and over again, accidentally forkbombing the victim, but it's only on an MCP server. Glorious. Okay. Absolutely glorious. It may have not been vibe coded, but a vibe coder most certainly found the vulnerability. See all those haters out there? All those haters of AI out there don't even realize it's actually vibe coding that's saving you right now. Okay, stop the hate. Now, I do think it's important to remind everybody that package managers are in fact evil. If you wish to read the essay, absolutely fantastic linked in the description. Okay, so now this is where the might shimaling starts getting uh real great. So this this Callum McMahon fella ends up opening up a ticket on GitHub and what ends up happening? Well, it turns out this GitHub repository gets absolutely bombarded with bot AI replies, thus attempting to suppress anybody's ability to read the actual issue or to see if any of the owners are going, "Oh, yeah, that's actually really bad." It just turns out there's Oh, great. Hey, great explanation. Thanks for sharing. Great explanation. Thanks for sharing. Hey, great explanation. Thanks for sharing. Load 59 more. I'm not even sure if GitHub can actually load it. Let's find out. Boom. Chicka boom. Chicka boom. Chicka boom. load [laughter] the data. All right. Nice. Okay. Actually, I think this is a real person. There we go. Uh, yep. We've been pawned by this. Uh, this is very, very bad. Thousands of people are likely getting poned right now. So, this is actually pretty dang serious. And then it goes on. Great example. Great example. Great fix. Oh, fantastic. You're the best. I think you're absolutely lovely. Oh, look at this. There's still 363 more. Do you have a just Rust alternative to the light LLM? Please, CLAUDE, USE A COMPUTER AND FIX IT. NO MISTAKES. THIS IS WHY I USE RUST. always use every opportunity to show Rust to prove that the owner was effectively compromised almost immediately upon opening the issue. The issue was closed is not planned somewhere in the middle of all these bot spam replies. The real terrifying part though is just this all these fake replies. It is something that would fill up so many people's inboxes they they may go investigate and just kind of feel confused on the ticket. And if this would have been done just a little bit snappier, who knows what would have happened. maybe more of this would have been missed for even longer. And all of these comments may have just caused the collaboration between everybody to kind of fall apart. It's really a a unique way of just adding friction that I never even came across my mind as possible. All right, hold on. Let me take off my trad. It's time to get the vibes going. Okay, you know why? Because of the last might shimalon turn to this story. Now, I'm going to show you something and maybe it won't make a lot of sense. Do you see it? Do you see what's wrong with this picture of the website? How about now? Do you see it now? Sock 2 type 1 secured by Delve. ISO27001 secured by Delve. But what is Delve? Well, it is AI native compliance. I don't know what that means, but apparently it's keeping your CISO out of jail via the power of AI. And what makes this even better, this entire story even better is that the opensource software that its owner got compromised due to some lack of security, some lapse in judgment is secured with their compliance by a company that is currently being accused of misleading their customers with fake compliance reports. [laughter] This is just it just it can't it can't actually get any funnier than this. And both Light LLM and Delve ARE BACKED BY Y COMBINATOR. IT'S JUST A OH MY GOSH, it's just life is art but unknown to thee. Absolutely hilarious. Now, if these alleged faking of sock 2 compliance reports are to be believed and ends up turning out to be true with Delve, it would actually mean that light LLM is falling apart on the open source side and their sock 2 compliance may not even be real. But at the end of the day, this hack actually caused a lot of problems. There's a lot of people that are suffering from it. We are in contact with the actor behind Trivy, which by the way, this is actually the second attack in this ecosystem, and Light LLM hack. They told us they're currently extorting several multi-billion dollar companies from which they exfiltrated data. They've obtained 300 GB of compressed credentials and are working their way through them as we speak. The light LLM compromise alone led to a half million stolen credentials according to the threat actor. Their message to the world, team PCP is here to stay. Long live the supply chain. They also have a lovely little logo right here. Now, if you happen to be someone who uses light LLM or uses a package that relies on light LLM, I would highly recommend rotating those keys because let's just face it, they came for your SSH keys. They came for your database passwords. They came for your M, your AWS, your Azure credentials, your Kubernets. They came for everything. They came even for your husbands. You got to hide everything from them because they're taking everybody keys around here. the name. This this is why again stop using Python. Okay. G gross language. Ew. Ew. I mean I guess I really can't I I honestly can't even make fun of Python. I often use TypeScript. So I mean what what am I what am I I'm literally throwing stones from a glass house at this point. A gen. Hey, do you want to learn how to code? Do you want to become a better backend engineer? Well, you got to check out boot.dev. Now, I personally have made a couple courses from them. I have live walkthroughs free available on YouTube of the whole course. Everything on boot.dev you can go through for free. But if you want the gamified experience, the tracking of your learning and all that, then you got to pay up the money. But hey, go check them out. It's awesome. 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