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

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

#121

Post by renegade-otter »

wolvoleo wrote: post #117
_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…

> Now in many places it is encouraged by coders and managers to vibe stuff on their own devices. Soon or later it will become a problem, especially for those that have no idea what they are doing. Yes in our place too. "You better do as much as possible with AI or you will be left behind" dogmas etc. It's the stupid IoT hype all over again. No concern for security, just trying to be the first in the pack.

"MongoDB is the hottest thing! No default creds, who cares about that! ONWARD TO PRODUCTION, SOLDIERS!"

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

#122

Post by cookiengineer »

JdeBP wrote: post #5

These seem related: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418318 ( The Blight Reaches Microsoft: 73 Repos Disabled in 105 Seconds ) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450543 ( Miasma Worm Hits Microsoft Again: Azure Functions Action and 72 Other Repositories Disabled After Supply Chain Attack Targeting AI Coding Agents ) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416155 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

I created a mitigation tool that can be used to fix/remove the worm from all infected repositories, and did a writeup about this.

On Monday, the Hades campaign introduced Composer, Go and Pip support. Before that it had only support for NPM and AI assistant editors. (Well, and Ruby btw but nobody uses Rubygems anymore it seems).

What even Microsoft gets wrong: This is the first worm that runs on all platforms in the code ecosystem. Developer host machines, servers, ci/cd runners. And all of them spread the worm to all repositories that are accessible on those machines.

You would have to completely shutdown 100% of all computers AND aws ec2 AND google cloud platform AND azure AND kubernetes clusters AT THE SAME TIME to beat this worm. It literally spreads across all infrastructure.

Kill switch, as always with APT28 malware, is setting the host language to ru_RU.KOI8-R (LANG environment variable). That disables the spread mechanism.

My Mitigation Tool (I'm updating it as new package systems are targeted ...):

https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

Blog post:

https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/malware-insights-mia...

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

#123

Post by madeofpalk »

watty wrote: post #103
_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 so…

As with many other things, AI exacerbates this problem. It’s so easy for many more of things things to happen unattended and in greater volume, and the AIs themselves can be tricked into doing these things, not helped by their patten of “prompt the user to approve 30 different inscrutable pythons and bash scripts”.

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

#125

Post by philipwhiuk »

bilekas wrote: post #62
philipwhiuk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure are able to be targets of supply chain attack because of the supply chain ecosystem that they still own . It's not really a supply chain when it's still yours.

> It's not really a supply chain when it's still yours. I don't personally buy that, they offer a package manager in the form of nuget for example, if their products there are compromised, they're well withing normal reach to block THEIR packages, but why would they need to block the rest ? Maybe I'm missing something dumb

* GitHub [which they own] failed to detect the account was compromised

* GitHub [which they own] allowed the contribution to ignore CI

* GitHub [which they own] failed to detect suspicious content on check-in

* GitHub [which they own] isn't sufficiently integrated into Microsoft security that the compromised token wasn't rolled.

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

#126

Post by philipwhiuk »

bilekas wrote: post #64
philipwhiuk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > This is Microsoft’s second known breach over the past few weeks that has allowed hackers to compromise its open source projects, per Ars Technica. > I, like many others love to knock on Microslop when I can, but in this case they did the right thing. I've no idea what your problem with this sentence is. They have an organisational security problem, aided/demonstrated by lack of effort to effectively lockdown GitH…

> That this is a Microsoft problem that was present pre-AI is not up for debate. See https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/CSRBReviewO ... No argument from me, but what would you have them do in the immediate timeframe ?

Some form of public communication from Microsoft Security indicating an actual threat to their ecosystem and published pipeline of work to reduce the ability of attacks to spread via GitHub actions.

They can publish self-congratulatory stuff like this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/06/05/sec... but they can't publish a post-mortem on their own platform?

I'm told that when Affirmed got compromised Microsoft Security descended on the org and rewrote their entire backlog. Where is the plan from GitHub that they are now taking security seriously given GitHub Actions is now a primary threat vector even for projects written by their own company.

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

#127

Post by 349187 »

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…

Maybe the company or the CEO are invested in AI companies. Half of this tokenmaxxing is ordered by legitimately insane people, the other half has vested interests.

When that boost disappears after the IPOs, everything will crash.

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

#128

Post by magicalhippo »

shakna wrote: post #37
protoman3000 wrote: post #9

And we trust these people with the root CA cert in our Secure Boot?

You mean the company that failed their 2023 security review? [0] > Individually, any one of the failings described above might be understandable. Taken together, they point to a failure of Microsoft’s organizational controls and governance, and of its corporate culture around security. Microsoft’s products and services are ubiquitous. It is one of the most important technology companies in the world, if not the most…

Guess that's what lead to the Secure Future Initiative[1], given it was launched late 2023[2]...

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trust-center/security/secure...

[2]: https://cybermagazine.com/articles/how-microsoft-is-securing...

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

#130

Post by philipwhiuk »

cookiengineer wrote: post #122
JdeBP wrote: post #5

These seem related: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418318 ( The Blight Reaches Microsoft: 73 Repos Disabled in 105 Seconds ) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450543 ( Miasma Worm Hits Microsoft Again: Azure Functions Action and 72 Other Repositories Disabled After Supply Chain Attack Targeting AI Coding Agents ) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416155 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

I created a mitigation tool that can be used to fix/remove the worm from all infected repositories, and did a writeup about this. On Monday, the Hades campaign introduced Composer, Go and Pip support. Before that it had only support for NPM and AI assistant editors. (Well, and Ruby btw but nobody uses Rubygems anymore it seems). What even Microsoft gets wrong: This is the first worm that runs on all platforms in the…

It only spreads if you run the code...
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