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

futuresearch.ai

111–120 of 194 posts

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

100% with you. Anything that builds from the first try is 100% malicious. No real software builds without 5-30 tweaks of the makefile. And anything on npm/pip is malicious with a fixed chance that you have no control over, as seen in this attack. But the data remains: no supply chain attacks on libc yet, so even if it COULD happen, this HAS and that merely COULD.

None that we know of, just like we didn’t know of the attack on xz until we did.

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

#112
post #33
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but this is a pretty onerous restriction. Do you think supply chain attacks will just get worse? I'm thinking that defensive measures will get better rapidly (especially after this hack)

They will certainly get worse. LLMs make it so much easier.

Agreed, as proven quite brutally over the last two weeks and especially the last three days.

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

#114
post #99

We mitigate this attack with the very uninspiring "wait 24h before dep upgrades" solution which is luckily already supported in uv.

Yeah, but uvx has this thing where it can automatically build the latest environment, and pull the latest (unpinned) version, right?

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

#115
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.

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.

sadly I still worry about that. An install fails once, you you hard code the --force flag in all your CI/CD jobs and we are back in the same place again. I am not sure what the answer is, though problems...

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

#116

I am confused; did you ever actually email anyone about the vuln? The AI suggests emailing security emails multiple times, but as I'm reading the timeline, none of the points seem to suggest this was ever done, only that a blog post was made, shared on Reddit, and then indirectly , the relevant parties took action. I'm hoping this just isn't on the timeline.

The first line of the post is:

> I'm the engineer who got PyPI to quarantine litellm.

In guessing they used a tool other than Claude Code to serve the email.

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

#117

[flagged]

But then what happens when everyone just shifts their window too. This solution is a misuse of the commons type thing where you just take advantage of letting others get poisoned and see if they drop

Scanners catch most of these within hours. The cooldown just buys them time to run, not waiting for some other dev to get hit first.

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

#118
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.

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.

What happens then if the security scanners say something is safe and it turns out not to be?

I don't think PyPI should be in the business of saying if a piece of software is safe to install or not.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sadly I still worry about that. An install fails once, you you hard code the --force flag in all your CI/CD jobs and we are back in the same place again. I am not sure what the answer is, though problems...

Adding a hardcoded flag is not the same as asking the user if they want potential malware. If CI/CD is broken they should revert the change to pinned dependencies instead of trying to install a bleeding edge version of a new dependency that hasn't been scanned yet.

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

#120

I am confused; did you ever actually email anyone about the vuln? The AI suggests emailing security emails multiple times, but as I'm reading the timeline, none of the points seem to suggest this was ever done, only that a blog post was made, shared on Reddit, and then indirectly , the relevant parties took action. I'm hoping this just isn't on the timeline.

The first line of the post is: > I'm the engineer who got PyPI to quarantine litellm. In guessing they used a tool other than Claude Code to serve the email.

"got" can be read as "indirectly, via a blog post, which I think they reacted to"
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