Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 211 posts

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#101

Post by LastTrain »

axegon_ wrote: post #66
haute_cuisine wrote: post #55

Please, someone explain how it's possible to add obfuscated file to so many repositories? Do they don't have any code reviews? Also, the title is misleading, setup adds config to be auto executed by people who work on the repo. They would have to use vscode/cursor/claude/gemini. People who use codex / opencode / other harnesses are safe I guess. Details: https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/miasma-worm-hits-microsoft-...

> Do they don't have any code reviews? I have a good friend that works for one of the giants(I can't say which one for obvious reasons but S&P 500). He's been working there for quite a while now, so far he hasn't seen what the project he works on looks like, has the repo cloned and knows what language is used but nothing beyond that. Everything is slopped together. His project is the authentication and authorization…

> have a good friend that works for one of the giants(I can't say which one for obvious reasons but S&P 500).

I can’t think of any obvious reason other than this being embellished / made up? Those companies have tens of thousands of employees you aren’t going to “out” anyone by naming the company.

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#102

Post by Klathmon »

red_admiral wrote: post #84
bob1029 wrote: post #20

I strongly suspect this is a case of classic personal access tokens being used in an unclean way. If you are going to be handing tokens to AI agents on weird openclaw contraptions, you should try to use the fine grained variants. My GitHub account spans 3 organizations with wildly differing policies. The fact that classic tokens are even still allowed blows my mind a bit. You should be required to manually opt in eac…

It feels to me like AI agents should be their own security principals and use access tokens generated speficically for them on the repos or orgs that they need access to. Handing an AI agent an access token "minted" for a human's account feels to me like the new "write the password on a post-it".

This is what I'm advocating for.

Give each dev's AI agent its own identity with its own access controls and tokens and everything.

It helps solve both the access control and attribution issues

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#103

Post by watty »

_pdp_ wrote: post #13

What follows next is purely speculation and it is based on my own observations and thoughts but based on what I've seen the old RBAC models, while being almost broken before, now it is fully broken, with the fact that now coding assistants and engineers are working on multiple unrelated projects simultaneously - especially working on wild experiments they had no time for previously. The risk of supply chain issue has…

Just to clarify, and I know you weren't saying they are related, but this has absolutely nothing to do with AI or vibe coding or manager code.

It's a continuation of the Shai Halud worm and the lack of security around developer dependnecy installations, which has existed for a very long time.

Hackers have figured out that developers themselves are an ideal target due to how easy it is to trick them into installing something and how much private information they have on their machines (creds, cloud clis, mcps, etc.).

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#104

Post by 8organicbits »

ashishb wrote: post #51

Nobody should do 'npm install' or 'pip install' on their machine. Using a proper sandboxing( https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox ) regularly will drastically limit the blast radius of these attacks.

Is there a detection component here too? Sandboxing development is great, but the next step is to deploy to production. How do you know if something malicious happened in the sandbox, such that you don't deploy the malware further?

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#105

Post by axegon_ »

LastTrain wrote: post #101
axegon_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do they don't have any code reviews? I have a good friend that works for one of the giants(I can't say which one for obvious reasons but S&P 500). He's been working there for quite a while now, so far he hasn't seen what the project he works on looks like, has the repo cloned and knows what language is used but nothing beyond that. Everything is slopped together. His project is the authentication and authorization…

> have a good friend that works for one of the giants(I can't say which one for obvious reasons but S&P 500). I can’t think of any obvious reason other than this being embellished / made up? Those companies have tens of thousands of employees you aren’t going to “out” anyone by naming the company.

I have a fair share of OSINT experience, be it as a hobby. The fact that I said S&P 500 and what his department does, that he is hired as a developer, I've already narrowed it down to several thousand people. Add the company name and you can narrow it down to a few dozens at most. And you can keep deducing further till you narrow it down to one or two.

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#106

Post by fc417fc802 »

_pdp_ wrote: post #48
altairprime wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argued for years that we had too few workers for our total project count and management argued that most projects were idle and so it was fine to have so many per worker. Welp.

I think web-based IDEs like GitHub Codespaces (but even VSCode with tunnels) is part of the solution because at the very least you can get an isolated dev environment per project. I've been advocating for this for as long as I remember. Unfortunately, most developers don't like them so it is a though sell.

Why would I ever want to use a browser based solution instead of local VMs? If you're worried about VM escapes then you have bigger problems (and hopefully a full time security team supporting you).

Edit: I realize in hindsight this comes across as overly negative. I think those are great solutions to have available for when you are working with a suboptimal local setup for whatever reason. I just don't think they're the default choice let alone any sort of ideal to strive for.

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#107

Post by IX-103 »

silon42 wrote: post #100
red_admiral wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels to me like AI agents should be their own security principals and use access tokens generated speficically for them on the repos or orgs that they need access to. Handing an AI agent an access token "minted" for a human's account feels to me like the new "write the password on a post-it".

Not just AI agents... basically, if you cd Projects/foo, that should be it's own user (for running npm, etc) that should not have access to parent user data (probably including github tokens, etc).

Why not both?

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#108

Post by subscribed »

sourcegrift wrote: post #98
dgellow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TechCrunch is very sloppy and unreliable. I’ve seen them reporting on things I worked on where they just invented facts for SEO purpose and there is no way to get them to correct

Which is worse tc or verge? Verge does similar making up of facts.

Similar. They both don't belong here.

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#109

Post by jasonjayr »

_pdp_ wrote: post #48
altairprime wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argued for years that we had too few workers for our total project count and management argued that most projects were idle and so it was fine to have so many per worker. Welp.

I think web-based IDEs like GitHub Codespaces (but even VSCode with tunnels) is part of the solution because at the very least you can get an isolated dev environment per project. I've been advocating for this for as long as I remember. Unfortunately, most developers don't like them so it is a though sell.

This is the leg of the cycle when we go back to mainframes & centralized computing? With all the datacenter build out; why wouldn't you want your services adjacent to the LLM processing centers?

Re: Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

#110

Post by sunaookami »

trumpdong wrote: post #71
sunaookami wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one should be foolish enough to trust Microsoft with anything regarding security. They showed time and time again over the past 40 years that they don't care.

Have you bought a PC in the last 10 years? Then it came with Microsoft's secure boot keys on it. Sometimes it's not even possible to remove or disable them. Sometimes you actually need a Microsoft-signed bootloader shim to boot anything that isn't Microsoft.

I haven't bought a Windows PC in the last 10 years, yes. I think the last Windows PC I bought was a used ThinkPad from 2011 that I upgraded and used until 2022.
Post reply on HN