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Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

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Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#121
post #39
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will also not get very far in engineering if you have a production incident, someone proposes a thing that will mitigate it partially but significantly, and you insist that we can't deploy that mitigation because we need to do the multi-year project that will actually fix it instead. Even if we still need that project, we also need that mitigation. Sure, solve the problem of "auditing and trusting codebases". Go…

Feel free to turn it off yourself, just don't be surprised when the attackers switch tactics. And don't make life harder for everyone else by pushing it as mandatory. (if you want a better mitigation: don't automatically update dependencies in CI. At a minimum have a cooling-off period that you only bypass on manual review. This is not hard to implement and at least gives some time for alarm bells to be sounded befor…

I mostly use languages where the feature doesn't even exist. We don't generally miss it.

I also blocked a proposed mandatory dependabot at work a few months back because I didn't like the way it created a pipeline for any hacker to push a hacked dependency straight into someone's codebase. I'm lifting my objection now that dependabot is defaulting to a 3-day cooldown, though the code bases I'm managing I'm setting to 7 days. (Not to be behind everyone else; I'd be fine if everyone joined me at 7 days. I don't really accept the freeloading objection, there's plenty of entities scanning things now no matter what cooldown you set. I just think 3 is a little tight to expect the full discovery and remediation to take place.)

So, whatever sort of "but it's really hard! I bet you don't do it yourself" implications you may be trying to draw fall very flat. Or whatever you may have been trying to imply about trusting this step but not trusting others... no, I do defense in depth. Giving up on defense in depth because one step isn't enough... well, I think I've probably played the "you won't get very far in engineering" card enough, but hey, here's one last time.

Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#122

Once again, I ask myself: should we start "shaming" developers who don't use isolation? It still seems I am the exception and most people run their dev environment with full permissions. Why? I also wrote an article ( https://evertheylen.eu/p/shame-devs-without-isolation/ ) to flesh out my thoughts, but I'd be really happy to discuss this in the comments.

I think it’s premature before a lot of tools improve to make that more workable: for example, if you use AWS how realistic is maintain separate IAM for each tool you run and map the right one into a sandbox for each tool? To use your editor’s GitHub integration with a token which can do basic operations and only retrieves a high-privilege token with a hardware presence check when you cut a release?

Theoretically you can do it but the friction is enough to make it non-viable.

Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#123

I've been building an OSS tool to detect software supply-chain attacks: https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj Packj uses static+dynamic code/behavioral analysis to scan for indicators of compromise (e.g., spawning of shell, use of SSH keys, network communication, use of decode+eval, etc). It also checks for several metadata attributes to detect impersonating packages (typo squatting).

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Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#125

I have a suspicion that a lot of these supply chain compromises are done by the security researchers at security vendors, selling software to protect the software supply chain. Spreading fear to create demand for their products. Like in the good ole days of Windows 98 and antivirus era, a lot of advanced virus techniques in the wild came from the people who used to work for AV companies

That is not a suspicion, but a (baseless) theory. I mean, your proof is from Windows 98. Might as well been an outlier or urban legend, who knows.

My theory is that people in countries without extradition laws to USA are going to spray the shit out of Americans. With spam, and crap like this worm, troll farms, and the like.

Also baseless, but people who work at SOC can notice an increase since some changes happened in geopolitics this decade.

Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#126

Couldn't GitHub detect a Shai-Hulud exfil repo being created and just... block it? Given that it's a worm, the attacker wouldn't be able to adapt all that quickly.

It's baffling that this hasn't been done after the 6th(?) time in the past year.

Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#127

Couldn't GitHub detect a Shai-Hulud exfil repo being created and just... block it? Given that it's a worm, the attacker wouldn't be able to adapt all that quickly.

We're talking about Microsoft, who created a notepad.exe that can run an RCE with an LLM bypass prompt.

In the previous Miasma waves, Microsoft was so overwhelmed that they delayed the VSCode extension installs for a couple days with a timeout; literally not understanding what was going on and neither how the malware was spreading.

Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#128

> Update — August 4, 2026, 13:37 CEST: At least 868 packages (across 1381 versions) have been compromised by the worm, with a combined total of over 2 billion monthly installs at the time of writing. This is such lazy or click baiting writing. Who cares how many installations there are per month normally? The high install numbers are almost certainly from running in CI where such secrets don’t exist. How many install…

> almost certainly from running in CI where such secrets don’t exist. CI usually has the most privileged secrets anywhere in a company lol

> CI usually has the most privileged secrets anywhere in a company lol

Literally the reason the stealer of Miasma was focusing on extracting tokens from the CI/CD runner from the start.

Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#129

I have a suspicion that a lot of these supply chain compromises are done by the security researchers at security vendors, selling software to protect the software supply chain. Spreading fear to create demand for their products. Like in the good ole days of Windows 98 and antivirus era, a lot of advanced virus techniques in the wild came from the people who used to work for AV companies

That's an explosive accusation and frankly quite irresponsible.

Is this based on evidence, or are you just stoking anger at no one in particular?

Re: Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

#130
yawns Good morning world,

Here's the updated Antimiasma tool for mitigation [1] [2]. More details on how this tool was built and how the Miasma worm works on my website [3].

This is the first false flag in the campaign series, where setting the "LANG" environment variable to "ru_RU.UTF-8" or "ru_RU.KOI8-R" won't stop the spreading mechanism.

So it's likely this could've been any script kiddie that modified the TeamPCP source code dump. It could now also be still APT28/29, that was kind of the purpose of the code dump... to gain plausible deniability :)

Anyways, stay safe folks.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

[2] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma/releases/tag/mia...

[3] https://cookie.engineer/projects/cyber-defense/antimiasma.ht...

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