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Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

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Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#151
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This might just be the frequency illusion at play, but there seem to have been a number of high-profile supply chain attacks of late in major packages. It's real. As of the beginning of April we'd had 7 in the past 12 months vs 9 in the two decades before that: https://www.jefftk.com/p/more-and-more-extensive-supply-chai...

I think the real question is "are we just hearing about it more now or has the actual rate of attack increased?"

Rate of attack increased over the past 5 years and multiple wars and proxy wars have broken out.

Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#152

Claude Code updates almost every day, sometimes multiple times. One of these days Anthropic is going to be compromised and we’re all gonna be f*cked.

Not if one is running it in a non-privileged vm/container with restricted network access. But everything is YOLO these days.

Forgive the tangent, but I'm just starting to learn about using AI for coding, and getting a safe sandbox is one of my next steps.

Any suggestions for a vm/container setup that works on a Linux host, provides the safety net you describe, and is still capable enough to try out all these things that people are talking about?

Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking back ten years to `left-pad`, are there more successful attacks now than ever? I can't vouch for the number of attacks, but, and since we are talking about Python, nothing substantially changed since the time of `left-pad`. The same bad things that enabled supply chain attacks in Python ten years ago are in place today. However, it looks like there are more projects and they are more interconnected than bef…

virtualenv isn't relocatable out of the box, so how else would you deploy a python project? You can call it laziness, but it's not like the python ecosystem has ever developed an answer for this problem. The only reasonable answer has been to use docker, which is basically admitting that the python community did nothing.

but is docker the solution, though? I don't think so, docker itself is prone to supply chain attacks from my understanding

Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#154
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This might just be the frequency illusion at play, but there seem to have been a number of high-profile supply chain attacks of late in major packages. It's real. As of the beginning of April we'd had 7 in the past 12 months vs 9 in the two decades before that: https://www.jefftk.com/p/more-and-more-extensive-supply-chai...

I think the real question is "are we just hearing about it more now or has the actual rate of attack increased?"

I looked pretty hard, with some LLM assistance, so if it was "are we just hearing about it more now" it would have to be old attacks that happened without being discovered and written up.

Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#155

It's crazy to me how just a year or so after xz people were willing to say "sure I'll take this giant black box so unauditable that even it's creators don't really know what's in it and run all my data through it"

I'm guessing it ultimately comes down to the legal / financial / career incentives.

My impression is that the market currently rewards visible software functionality with little concern for invisible risk.

If we flipped the script, and investors were personally, criminally, and civilly liable for computer breaches, I imagine this problem would disappear almost overnight.

Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#156
post #32

This might just be the frequency illusion at play, but there seem to have been a number of high-profile supply chain attacks of late in major packages. There are several articles on the first few pages of HN right now with different cases. Looking back ten years to `left-pad`, are there more successful attacks now than ever? I would suspect so, and surely the value of a successful attack has also increased, so are we…

> idiot friendly tooling is somewhat lacking for projects which start as hobby/amateur code but end up being a dependency in many other projects.

Historically, extra-security-scanned artefact handling has been a paid enterprise option. Whereas the less secure option is the much-less-hassle default.

IDK how good a business model this is, I suspect not very.

Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#158
post #61

Most of my pip installs come from Claude Code suggesting them now and me just hitting enter. Model was trained months ago, so it has no clue what got compromised this week. We built the worst possible filter for "is this package safe right now".

This is easily circumvented by not pressing Enter.

Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#159
post #32

This might just be the frequency illusion at play, but there seem to have been a number of high-profile supply chain attacks of late in major packages. There are several articles on the first few pages of HN right now with different cases. Looking back ten years to `left-pad`, are there more successful attacks now than ever? I would suspect so, and surely the value of a successful attack has also increased, so are we…

People are ramming tons of code into places without ever looking at it, it would follow that supply chain attacks would increase thusly.

I feel this is an inevitable consequence of a move towards languages with a culture of many small and transitive dependencies.

If my project has 100 dependencies, the release of an updated dependency will inevitably be a daily occurrence.

Re: Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are ramming tons of code into places without ever looking at it, it would follow that supply chain attacks would increase thusly.

Yeah, and ultimately no body cares. Everyone assumes it’s just some process miss, and we need to add another step to the process and move on. Fuck ups that would have killed the credibility of projects 10 years ago are now treated as “eeh what are you gonna do. Sometimes you ship malware. Will look into it”

> Yeah, and ultimately no body cares.

More like hiding their heads in the sand in circumstances that are outside of their ability to fix. None of the tooling or practices out there push you in the direction of not being at risk, or even provide you with easy ways to stay completely safe: no external packages needed to develop software with everything you NEED being provided out of the box, or a flow where pulling in a new package makes you review all of its source code line by line and compile everything instead of any binary tooling blobs, or built in vulnerability and configuration scanning so you don't get pwned by Trivy or don't leave an open S3 bucket somewhere, which also means that obviously you'd need thorough observability and alerting for any of the cloud stuff you do.

And even when they exist, your org projects might be painfully out of date, too much to use those approaches, or the org culture might not be there, or any number of other issues I can't even imagine. On one hand, people are running out of date software and those have CVEs, on the other using dependencies that are too new also puts you at risks of compromised packages - it's like we're being squeezed by rocks on both sides in a landslide or something. Even at the OS level, the fact that everyone is not running something like Qubes OS or regular VMs for development is absolutely insane. The fact that all software isn't sandboxed and that desktop OSes don't prompt for permissions like mobile apps do is absolutely insane. That we don't have firewalls like Glasswire as standard that prompt you for external connections, or don't allow easily blocking what you don't trust is insane.

Despite lots of people trying their best, on some level, everything both up and down the stack is absolutely fucked for a variety of complex reasons. You'd have to largely tear it all down and rebuild everything starting with your OS kernel in a memory safe language and formal proofs and thorough testing for everything (if it took SQLite as long as it did to get a decent test suite, it might as well take on the order of decades to do it for a production OS kernel and drivers), then do the same for all userland software and DBs and tooling and dependency management and secrets management (not just random files, special hardware most likely) and so on. It's not happening, so we just build towers of cards.

For something more practical: https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/04/package-managers-need-to-cool-...

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