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Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

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Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#71

Post by skydhash »

coldpie wrote: post #54
f311a wrote: post #11

People 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…

The thing is, system based package managers require discipline, especially from library authors. Even in the web world, it’s really distressing when you see a minor library is already on its 15 iteration in less that 5 years.

I was trying to build just (the task runner) on Debian 12 and it was impossible. It kept complaining about rust version, then some libraries shenanigans. It is way easier to build Emacs and ffmpeg.

Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#72

Post by sneak »

grav wrote: post #32

> Interestingly, the malware checks for the presence of Claude Code CLI or Gemini CLI on the system to offload much of the fingerprintable code to a prompt. Can anyone explain this? Why is it an advantage?

Furthermore most people have probably granted the node binary access to everything in their home directory on macOS. Other processes would pop up a permission dialog.

Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#73

Post by eightys3v3n »

terminalbraid wrote: post #48
vorgol wrote: post #20

OSs need to stop letting applications have a free reign of all the files on the file system by default. Some apps come with apparmor/selinux profiles and firejail is also a solution. But the UX needs to change.

Which operating system lets an application have "free reign of all the files on the file system by default"? Neither Linux, nor any BSD, nor MacOS, nor Windows does. For any of those I'd have to do something deliberately unsafe such as running it as a privileged account (which is not the "default").

I would argue the distinction between my own user and root is not meaningful when they say "all files by default". As my own user, it can still access everything I can on a daily basis which is likely everything of importance. Sure it can't replace the sudo binary or something like that, but it doesn't matter because it's already too late. Why when I download and run Firefox can it access every file my user can access, by default. Why couldn't it work a little closer to Android with an option for the user to open up more access. I think this is what they were getting at.

Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#74

Post by skydhash »

rootnod3 wrote: post #59
coldpie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [1]: https://github.com/fosskers/vend

Vendoring is nice. Using the system version is nicer. If you can’t run on $current_debian, that’s very much a you problem. If postgres and nginx can do it, you can too.

Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#75

Post by coldpie »

rootnod3 wrote: post #59
coldpie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [1]: https://github.com/fosskers/vend

I didn't vendor them, but I did do an eyeball scan of every package in the full tree for my project, primarily to gather their license requirements[1]. (This was surprisingly difficult for something that every project in theory must do to meet licensing requirements!) It amounted to approximately 50 dependencies pulled into the build, to create a single gstreamer plugin. Not a fan.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/f21922d970888...

Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#77

Post by jpalawaga »

sneak wrote: post #60
snovymgodym wrote: post #55

Claude 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 .

So we’re declaring all software with auto-updaters as RCE? That doesn’t seem like a useful distinction.

Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#78

Post by BobbyTables2 »

coldpie wrote: post #54
f311a wrote: post #11

People 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.

So many people are so drunk on the kool aid, I often wonder if I’m the weirdo for not wanting dozens of third party libraries just to build a simple HTTP client for a simple internal REST api. (No I don’t want tokio, Unicode, multipart forms, SSL, web sockets, …). At least Rust has “features”. With pip and such, avoiding the kitchen sink is not an option.

I also find anything not extensively used has bugs or missing features I need. It’s easier to fork/replace a lot of simple dependencies than hope the maintainer merges my PR on a timeline convenient for my work.

Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#79

Post by otterley »

sneak wrote: post #62
kasey_junk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it does; you are thinking of agent tool calls. The software package itself runs as your uid and can do anything you can do (except on macOS where reading of certain directories is individually gated).

Claude Code is an agent. It will not call any tools or commands without your prior consent.

Edit: unless you pass it an override like --dangerously-skip-permissions, as this malware does. https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/supply-chain-security-alert...

Re: Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

#80

Post by saberience »

snovymgodym wrote: post #55

Claude 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…

So what?

It doesn't run by itself, you have to choose to run it. We have tons of apps with loads of permissions. The terminal can also mess with your filesystem and run commands... sure, but it doesn't open by itself and run commands itself. You have to literally run claude code and tell it to do stuff. It's not some living, breathing demon that's going to destroy your computer while you're at work.

Claude Code is the most amazing and game changing tool I've used since I first used a computer 30 years ago. I couldn't give two fucks about its "vectors of attack", none of them matter if no one has unauthorized access to my computer, and if they do, Claude Code is the least of my issues.

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