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...
My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
151–160 of 194 posts
Re: My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
#152Earlier 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.
Re: My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
#153Re: My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
#154Re: My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
#155Earlier 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.
Re: My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
#156Re: My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
#157Earlier 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
#158Earlier 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.
Re: My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
#159Earlier 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.
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
#160Interesting 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 an example of an AI agent taking 40 minutes to do some basic ass sysadmin troubleshooting tasks. 100x faster than who? An ”expert”?