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Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

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Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#291
post #15

[EDIT: See the response by a Cursor dev below — looks like it was not authorized by them] Sounds to me like Cursor internally has a private NPM registry with those packages. Because of how NPM works, it's quite easy to trick it to fetch the packages from the public registry instead, which could be used by an attacker [0]. Assumably, this Snyk employee either found or suspected that some part of Cursor's build is misc…

Hey there! I run DevRel & SecRel @ Snyk, we just published a piece to help dispel all the rumors, etc. This provides a lot of in-depth info on the situation: https://snyk.io/blog/snyk-security-labs-testing-update-curso...

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#292

In the Java world, you need to prove ownership of a given namespace (group id), e.g. via a TXT record for that domain. Isn't there a similar concept for NPM? The package is named sn4k-s3c/call-home, how will a victim be tricked into referencing that namespace sn4k-s3c (which I suppose is owned by the attacker, not Cursor)? I feel like I'm missing part of the picture here.

You're referring to what I described previously here... ironically back when the first dependency confusion research was published: https://www.sonatype.com/blog/why-namespacing-matters-in-pub...

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#293
Hey there! I run DevRel & SecRel @ Snyk, we just published a piece to help dispel all the rumors, etc. This provides a lot of in-depth info on the situation: https://snyk.io/blog/snyk-security-labs-testing-update-curso...

The TL;DR is that our security research team routinely hunts for various vulnerabilities in tools developers use. In this particular case, we looked at a potential dependency confusion attack in Cursor, but found no vulnerabilities.

There's no malicious intent or action here, but I can certainly understand how it appears when there's not a ton of information and things like this occur! As a sidenote, I use Cursor all the time and love it <3

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#294
post #75

Side note: Snyk (founded 2015, computer and network security) has nothing to do with @sneak (hacking since 1998, computer and network security). I was dismayed to learn about their choice of brand, and think it might cause confusion. :(

The name 'snyk' is an acronym, it stands for 'so now you know' (about security vulnerabilities) =D

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like this are suppose to be provenance of an organizations security engineering teams. Helping to ensure you don't ship something like this. It's also hard for them too because no one wants to force developers to re-implement already solved functionality.

I also have never met a security engineer that was eager to do that.

> never met a security engineer that was eager to do that

Of course not. We do the fun parts, and write tickets to make the dev team do the boring parts that we will later complain are not implemented to the quality standard we would have reached, had we done the work. That's the deal.

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#296
post #229
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absurd. If that's your claim, do you know how many of your daily tools and hardware you should also drop?

I’m dropping as many as I can as is my prerogative as a consumer.

Do you need some help with that? I'll be more than happy if antisemites like you won't be using any of the advanced tech we're working hard to create .

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#297
post #296
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m dropping as many as I can as is my prerogative as a consumer.

Do you need some help with that? I'll be more than happy if antisemites like you won't be using any of the advanced tech we're working hard to create .

Sure, where do you work? I’ll be happy to add it to my list!

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it is on similar to criticism of TikTok or Huwaei and China. It has less to do with whether it malicious intent from the start of building an organization for explicit intent of capturing core infra. It has more to do with how the Government of Israel operates and the legal requests they can make of their citizens and/or veterans. Perhaps concern over Israeli products should be probably higher than for Ch…

You mean like how we found out that China attacked and pwn3d the entire US phone system? That’s not a shining example of discretion.

As the U.S. has done to our closest allies and their leaders, would be shocking and incompetent if they have not done much more in Russia and China and vice versa

There is no equivalence intelligence gathering or gaining the capability for sabotage (which everyone does) versus actual active sabotage which today only Israel executes like with Stuxnet or with the pagers.

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with SElinux is usability. A company called intrinsic tried a similar "allowlist" approach to javascript based on the assumption that you could never control this sprawl and had to assume every package was malicious. I never saw the technology take off because generating the allowlist was of course error prone. im not sure what has to change in UX to make these approaches more palatable, but if you have to…

I think we need to to focus on empirical consensus rather than taking as authoritative some file which makes claims about what a particular piece of software will or won't do. So before running any code you'd hash it and ask your peers: "what do we think this does?" If it does something surprising, you roll back its effects (or maybe it was in a sandbox in the first place) and you update your peers so that next time…

This both is and isn't what SELinux does though: the point of SELinux is when you execute a binary, it runs with whatever context is assigned to it and is bounded by that context (or allowed transitions).

This is super powerful to implement exactly that, but for whatever reason IMO it's constantly been half-assed on the UI front, because the best version of it isn't "detailed policy confinements for system software" but detailed confinements for user data (which was the original idea that conceived it at the NSA - the data model ultimately looks a lot like how classified data works).

AFAIK the biggest problem is that you can't really do an ACL like configuration for it though - i.e. if I categorize all my SSH keys as type ssh_private_key_t, I'm not able to add an additional tag on that to grant targeted access to a specific program (which both does, and does not make sense - i.e. if I'm handing a program one private key but I think it might leak it...why am I doing that? Conversely in the real world we're bounding risk, so I should be able to do that - I don't think Multi-Category Security fixes this?).

Basically "empirical consensus" is an SELinux policy, in fact you can generate one that way - run in permissive mode for an application type, collect the actions as policy, publish for that specific hash...you know I'm honestly wondering if this is just something we need to start doing as an open source service?

Re: Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

#300
post #15

[EDIT: See the response by a Cursor dev below — looks like it was not authorized by them] Sounds to me like Cursor internally has a private NPM registry with those packages. Because of how NPM works, it's quite easy to trick it to fetch the packages from the public registry instead, which could be used by an attacker [0]. Assumably, this Snyk employee either found or suspected that some part of Cursor's build is misc…

Hey there! I run DevRel & SecRel @ Snyk, we just published a piece to help dispel all the rumors, etc. This provides a lot of in-depth info on the situation: https://snyk.io/blog/snyk-security-labs-testing-update-curso...

This response doesn't make a lot of sense.

What's the justification for taking all of the environment variables? This post tries to paper over that particular problem. If your goal was to see if you could attack the dependency chain the first steps of user+hostname would have been sufficient to prove your case.

Taking the environment variables is about taking the secrets, and kind of moves this from PoC to opposition supply chain attack. Not to mention it's not only Cursor devs that would be affected by this, it could have (if your plan worked) attacked anyone using the extensions.

It's also a tough buy given the note about the Snyk cofounder moving to compete directly with Cursor (courtesy @tankster): https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/14/tessl-raises-125m-at-at-50...

Assuming truly innocent motivations, you guys still need to give your heads a shake and rethink your approaches here.

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