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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

#81

Post by CrzyLngPwd »

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.

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

#85

Post by charcircuit »

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.

It should not let people download unscanned dependencies without a warning and asking the user to override and use a potentially insecure package. If such security bug is critical enough to need to bypass this time (spoiler: realistically it is not actually that bad for a security fix to be delayed) they can work with the pypi security team to do a quicker manual review of the change.

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

#86

Post by gus_ »

Shank wrote: post #39

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!

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.

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

#90

Post by __mharrison__ »

anematode wrote: post #71
__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…

Dear lord. Are you at least transparent with your clients that this is the standard to which you hold your own code?

$100k was the quote of the project from sloccount... (No one paid me for this. I created it for myself.)
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