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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

#151

I have a hard time believing that Claude instantly figured out this was malware... I've fed it obfuscated JavaScript before, and it couldn't figure it out... and then there was the time I tried to teach it nftables... whooo boy...

Hard to know with this nondeterministic shit.

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

#152
post #49

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.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a sometimes peripheral and sometimes primary program manager for vulnerability disclosure, for companies you nearly can't avoid, $0.02 follows. It's a signal vs noise thing. Most of the grief is caused by bottom feeders shoveling anything they can squint at and call a vulnerability and asking for money. Maybe once a month someone would run a free tool and blindly send snippets of the output promising the rest in e…

Isn’t this a great use of llms? Clone the repo in a sandbox and have the llm identify if the issues are real and the appropriate response based on severity level. Wouldn’t be perfect but would have caught something like this.

Humans + LLMs are really good at producing enough spam to overwhelm anything like this. There’s a reason curl bans LLM slop reports now.

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

#157
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.

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

#158
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.

The whole point is that this would give a false sense of security. Scanned dependencies aren't secure, they're just scanned by some tools which might catch some issues. If you care about security, you need to run those same scans on your side, perhaps with many more rules enabled, perhaps with multiple tools. PyPI, understandably, does NOT want to take any steps to make it seem like they promise their repo doesn't contain any malware. They make various best effort attempts to keep it that way, but the responsibility ultimately falls on you, not on them.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was concerned about that too. Often when you tell them not to do something, you were better off not mentioning it in the first place. It's like they get fixated.

Don't think of a pink elephant.

Best way I've found not to think of a pink elephant is to choose to think of a green rabbit. Really focus on the mental image of the green rabbit... and voila, you're not thinking of, what was it again? Eh, not as important as this green rabbit I'm focusing on.

How to translate that to LLM world, though, is a question I don't know the answer to.

P.S. Obviously that won't prevent you from having that first mental flash of a pink elephant prompted by reading the words. The green-rabbit technique is more for not dwelling on thoughts you want to get out of your head. Can't prevent them from flashing in, but can prevent them from sticking around by choosing to focus on something else.

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

#160

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…

This article is a wonderful example of an expert leveraging AI to do normal work 100x faster.

This article is an example of an AI agent taking 40 minutes to do some basic ass sysadmin troubleshooting tasks. 100x faster than who? An ”expert”?

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