Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: Was not supposed to create a flamewar about semantics...
It’s not an RCE, it is a supply chain attack.
It's an RCE delivered via supply chain attack
Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
51–60 of 460 posts
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#52I love the header on that page:
> Secure Vibe Coding Starts Here. Wherever code is built, we keep it secure. Learn more →
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#53Google and Anthropic: this is a SEV0. Assemble your teams and immediately do the following: 1. Issue a public statement that you are aware of this issue and are tracking it 2. Begin monitoring your analytics to see which customers are impacted and shut down their access 3. Reach out to impacted customers and let them know you'll be preparing a list of next steps for them. 4. Monitor for a wider blast radius or larger…
What does Google or Antropic have to do with anything here? NX was compromised. Threat actors are using this access to leverage CLI LLMs to search the computer for you. Is this any different than if they just ran a big /find? Should the AI Assistant NOT reply to the request it was given? Why shouldn't it?
> Should the AI Assistant NOT reply to the request it was given? Why shouldn't it?
LLMs are not a dumb interpreter. At minimum, they are a client-server architecture that can be used as a control plane. But they are much more than that and can likely employ advanced detection and classification heuristics.
The vendors have the capability of (1) stopping this in its tracks, (2) understanding the extent of the attack and notifying customers, (3) studying the breadth of approaches used (4) for future, more ambitious attacks, monitoring them live as threat actors explore systems.
Google and Anthropic absolutely have responsibility here and must devote resources to this.
I am shocked that this is being met with such hostility. I cannot picture a world where LLM vendors are not responsible for making a best attempt at safeguarding their customers. Especially as they seek to have a greater role in business and financial automation.
I've worked at fintechs and we had to go out of our way to look out for our customers. We purchased compromised password and email lists and scanned for impacted customers. Our business didn't cause the data breaches, but we viewed it as our responsibility to protect customers.
Google and Anthropic have the greatest opportunity to make a difference here.
* THIS IS ABSOLUTELY A SEV0 FOR GOOGLE AND ANTHROPIC *:
While it's not a systems outage, it has incredible potential to shape future business and market sentiment. There are going to be major articles written about this in every publication you can think of. Publications that business decision makers read. Forbes, the New York Times, Business Insider. And Google and Anthropic are going to want to own their blurb and state that they acted fast and responsibly. If they're lucky, they can even spin this as an opportunity.
This is the difference between LLMs being allowed in the business workplace and being met with increasing scrutiny. (Not that they shouldn't be scrutinized, but that this incident will overwhelmingly shape the future of the decision envelope.)
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#54People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year. This week, I needed to add a progress bar with 8 stats counters to my Go project. I looked at the libraries, and they all had 3000+ lines of code. I asked LLM to write me a simple progress report tracking UI, and it was less than 150 lines. It works as expected, no dependencies needed. It's extremely simpl…
> People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year.
I was really nervous when "language package managers" started to catch on. I work in the systems programming world, not the web world, so for the past decade, I looked from a distance at stuff like pip and npm and whatever with kind of a questionable side-eye. But when I did a Rust project and saw how trivially easy it was to pull in dozens of completely un-reviewed dependencies from the Internet with Cargo via a single line in a config file, I knew we were in for a bad time. Sure enough. This is a bad direction, and we need to turn back now. (We won't. There is no such thing as computer security.)
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#55Claude code is by all accounts a revolutionary tool for getting useful work done on a computer.
It's also:
- a NodeJS app
- installed by curling a shell script and piping it into bash
- an LLM that's given free reign to mess with the filesystem, run commands, etc.
So that's what, like 3 big glaring vectors of attack for your system right there?
I would never feel comfortable running it outside of some kind of sandbox, e.g. VM, container, dedicated dev box, etc.
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#56Claude code is by all accounts a revolutionary tool for getting useful work done on a computer. It's also: - a NodeJS app - installed by curling a shell script and piping it into bash - an LLM that's given free reign to mess with the filesystem, run commands, etc. So that's what, like 3 big glaring vectors of attack for your system right there? I would never feel comfortable running it outside of some kind of sandbox…
I definitely think running agents in sandboxes is the way to go.
That said Claude code does not have free reign to run commands out of the gate.
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#57That is really dire. Equivalent to a SEV0. Why would you allow AI agents like Anthropic and Gemini to have access to the user's filesystem? Basic security 101 requirements for these tools is that they should be sandboxed and have zero unattended access to the user's filesystem. Do software engineers building these agents in 2025 care about best practices anymore?
The engineers who care haven't shipped yet because they see the risks.
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#58People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year. This week, I needed to add a progress bar with 8 stats counters to my Go project. I looked at the libraries, and they all had 3000+ lines of code. I asked LLM to write me a simple progress report tracking UI, and it was less than 150 lines. It works as expected, no dependencies needed. It's extremely simpl…
Part of the value proposition for bringing in outside libraries was: when they improve it, you get that automatically. Now the threat is: when they “improve” it, you get that automatically. left-pad should have been a major wake up call. Instead, the lesson people took away from it seems to have mostly been, “haha, look at those idiots pulling in an entire dependency for ten lines of code. I, on the other hand, am in…
The problem is less the size of a single dependency but the transitivity of adding dependencies. It used to be, library developers sought to not depend on other libraries if they could avoid it, because it meant their users had to make their build systems more complicated. It was unusual for a complete project to have a dependency graph more than two levels deep. Package managers let you easily build these gigantic dependency graphs with ease. Great for productivity, not so much for security.
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#59People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year. This week, I needed to add a progress bar with 8 stats counters to my Go project. I looked at the libraries, and they all had 3000+ lines of code. I asked LLM to write me a simple progress report tracking UI, and it was less than 150 lines. It works as expected, no dependencies needed. It's extremely simpl…
> People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year. I was really nervous when "language package managers" started to catch on. I work in the systems programming world, not the web world, so for the past decade, I looked from a distance at stuff like pip and npm and whatever with kind of a questionable side-eye. But when I did a Rust project and saw how tr…
Fully agree. That is why I vendor all my dependencies. On the common lisp side a new tool emerged a while ago for that[1].
On top of that, I try to keep the dependencies to an absolute minimum. In my current project it's 15 dependencies, including the sub-dependencies.
Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
#60Claude code is by all accounts a revolutionary tool for getting useful work done on a computer. It's also: - a NodeJS app - installed by curling a shell script and piping it into bash - an LLM that's given free reign to mess with the filesystem, run commands, etc. So that's what, like 3 big glaring vectors of attack for your system right there? I would never feel comfortable running it outside of some kind of sandbox…
None of this is the concerning part. The bad part is that it auto-updates while running without intervention - i.e. it is RCE on your machine for Anthropic by design.