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

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

#51

Post by __mharrison__ »

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.

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

#52

Post by intothemild »

cdcarter wrote: post #50

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.

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.

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

#53

Post by masijo »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #51

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 d…

>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"?

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

#54

Post by woodruffw »

dmitrygr wrote: post #45
woodruffw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it does; I think the industry opinion on xz is that we got lucky in terms of early detection, and that we shouldn't depend on luck. (I don't know what a "sane" distro is; empirically lots of distros are bleeding-edge, so we need to think about these things regardless of value judgements.)

Sane: debian-stable

From experience, a lot of people using a "stable" distro are just bypassing that distro's stability (read: staleness) by installing nightly things from a language ecosystem. It's not clear to me that this is a better (or worse) outcome than a less stable distro.

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

#55

Post by __mharrison__ »

simonw wrote: post #49
charcircuit wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not effective if it just takes a simple base64 encode to bypass. If Claude is trivially able to find that it is malicious then Pypi is being negligent.

The package in question was live for 46 minutes. It generally takes longer than that for security partners to scan and flag packages. PyPI doesn't block package uploads awaiting security scanning - that would be a bad idea for a number of reasons, most notably (in my opinion) that it would be making promises that PyPI couldn't keep and lull people into a false sense of security.

I realize this is controversial (and many Python folks would claim anti ethical). But I keep wondering if requiring a small payment for registering and updating packages would help. The money could go to maintaining pypix as well as automated AI analysis. Folks who really couldn't afford it could apply for sponsorship.

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

#56

Post by pxtail »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #51

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 d…

Only $100k worth code? Rookie numbers, you must be new to the game

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

#57

Post by edf13 »

Fibonar wrote: post #2

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 Cla…

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

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

#59

Post by ddp26 »

Bullhorn9268 wrote: post #28

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

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

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

#60

Post by simonw »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The package in question was live for 46 minutes. It generally takes longer than that for security partners to scan and flag packages. PyPI doesn't block package uploads awaiting security scanning - that would be a bad idea for a number of reasons, most notably (in my opinion) that it would be making promises that PyPI couldn't keep and lull people into a false sense of security.

I realize this is controversial (and many Python folks would claim anti ethical). But I keep wondering if requiring a small payment for registering and updating packages would help. The money could go to maintaining pypix as well as automated AI analysis. Folks who really couldn't afford it could apply for sponsorship.

Very much not speaking for the PSF here, but my personal opinion on why that wouldn't work is that Python is a global language and collecting fees on a global basis is inherently difficult - and we don't want to discriminate against people in countries where the payment infrastructure is hard to support.

PyPI has paid organization accounts now which are beginning to form a meaningful revenue stream: https://docs.pypi.org/organization-accounts/pricing-and-paym...

Plus a small fee wouldn't deter malware authors, who would likely have easy access to stolen credit cards - which would expose PyPI to the chargebacks and fraudulent transactions world as well!

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