The implication that I don't know what I'm looking at, or that I don't know what security is (despite having a clean track record for about 15 years now) was a bit aggravating.

In fact, even months later, the lasting effects have been panicking over anything that is remotely suspicious. The most recent example was just a few days ago. Had just gotten on the plane to go on vacation when someone Liked the original "I've been pwned" post on Bluesky. I misread the notification as being a new message to me saying "You've been pwned" and started to panick. I'd have had no way to address it and it would have ruined the small chance per year I get to have a break.

The attack last year wasn't me misunderstanding security. It was the sum of many, many small things (my history with and perception of npm especially w.r.t. their security posture and poor outreach over the years, being stressed out overall, and being in a rush at that particular moment, and a few other personal things) coming together in a perfect storm that resulted in the attack.

edit: actually more and more thing I'm recognizing as being entirely serious (ie benelovent worms :D); satire indistinguishable from reality

> Status: Resolved (accidentally)

> Severity: Critical → Catastrophic → Somehow Fine

for a real CVE report?

Heh. I didn't even blink at that. I know a couple of open-source folks who actually packed up to buy off-grid farms in Portugal

I got a bit curious and here is an incomplete list of crates to compromise to be part of the cargo build and that already have a build.rs so it doesn't stand out to much:

flate2 tar curl-sys libgit2-sys openssl-sys libsqlite3-sys blake3 libz-sys zstd-sys cc

As a nice bonus - if you get rights for xz2 you can compromise rustup.

Fwiw at least they do track Cargo.lock

The issue here isn't Alex Crichton going rogue, but rather, some malware stealing his credentials to use them to publish more malware in crates.io

In this sense, the more well known and upstanding Rust developer, the higher the risk they will be targeted by such operations

    would not be difficult

Of course, crates.io has surely had some malicious packages. (I'd assume it isn't all that unlikely there could be some undiscovered right now; it's definitely large enough for something like that to slip under the radar, even if it is relatively small compared to say, NPM.) But, I think it really hasn't had its XZ backdoor moment, its left-pad, where you really get to see how well it does or doesn't handle a serious challenge. Since I have actually not published on crates.io, I'm not really sure how the security posture is, but if it's more similar to other programming language repositories than it is to Linux repos, I dunno exactly why it would be hard to believe a high-level compromise is possible and could slip in (really, anywhere, be it a build script or otherwise.). Of course, "would not be difficult" is all relative. I'm sure many of these attacks are not really all that simple, but a lot of them aren't exactly groundbreaking either. It was well executed and took quite a lot of time, sure, but there wasn't all that much about the XZ backdoor that was novel. (Except maybe the slyness with which the payload was hidden in test files. That was pretty cool.)

[1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/09/24/crates.io-malicious-cr...

It's great that there's so much momentum in fixing the glaring problems with supply chain systems like npm, but I'm concerned that we're entering a new era of security-related problems caused in large part by agentic development.

I'm not just talking about Mythos/Glasswing surfacing vulnerabilities in pretty much everything it touches; I think the way we're developing software, pulling in dependencies, and potentially losing human thought modeling of complex systems is going to lead to a lot of hacked together software and infrastructure that humans won't fully understand.

I hope in a few years we don't look back at today and wonder how we could have been so naive -- how we failed to actually plan for the long-tail of AI development in a way that doesn't solve problems by attempting to just use AI to rebuild complex systems.

But the article was funny.

Was it? I thought Zuckerberg coined this horrible phrase.

Even without the specific words, look to product teams debating tradeoffs of going to market vs. waiting for better security controls. They're pushing for faster product release every time, at pretty much every org.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Got me seriously laughing... Such a troll.

I know we're not in the era when a windows pc will happily run any autorun.inf and .EXE file found on an inserted flash drive or DVD anymore. But even so. What if it didn't even have any malicious data payload but somebody was shipping USB-A interface capacitor based usb killers?

https://www.slashgear.com/1819672/usb-killer-explained-kill-...

What if it did have data on it and came with a slick color brochure walking people through how to run the binary, or in a linux or developer specific audience, how to 'sudo' the ELF binary that lives on its filesystem?

> CI passed because the malware installed volkswagen

We need this to ocassionally make us stop and think about what we are doing.

>"Root Cause: A dog named Kubernets ate a Yubikey

Ah, yes, irresponsible to get taken in by one of the well-known classic exploits. The 'ol "distract someone with a lottery windfall & make a dongle irresistibly tasty to another person's pet". When will people learn.

> who asked us to clarify that the fish shell is not malware, it just feels that way sometimes.

And unrelated to shells...

> The author would like to remind stakeholders that the security team’s headcount request has been in the backlog since Q1 2023.

I also feel seen by this.

As an alternative, it could apt-get or dnf install 'figlet' and then overwrite the contents of /etc/motd with 'all your base are belong to us' in extremely large ASCII art font.

Technically... that's not even a joke... that really is what kicked off this entire chain of events lol.

This post reads like an actual movie lol. Someone seriously needs to make one based on this.

It has everything:

the missing key that starts the chaos, the scam nobody sees coming, one tiny mistake turning into a full-on domino disaster, sleep-deprived people making very confident bad decisions, the guy who disappeared to a farm living his best life while holding a critical piece of the puzzle... and somehow, in the final act, a completely unrelated villain accidentally saves everyone.

Imma 100% watch it..

Supply Chain problem(SCP)

Honest question. Commons, Guava, Spring, and more seem to take this approach successfully (as in, the drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits in convenience, quality, and security) in Java. Are benefits in binary size really worth that complexity?

And before someone says “just have a better standard library”, think about why that is considered a solution here. Languages with a large and capable standard library remain more secure than the supply-chain fiascos on NPM because they have a) very large communities reviewing and participating in changes and b) have extremely regulated and careful release processes. Those things aren’t likely to be possible in most small community libraries.

Commons and Spring have spent significant effort to break themselves up in the past, and would probably come as aggregations of much smaller pieces if they could be started today with the benefit of hindsight.

Smaller implementations are also easier to review against malware, because there are fewer places to hide. You don't have to guess how a component may interact with all the other parts of a large framework, because there aren't any.

There are also practical Rust-specific concerns. Fine-grained code reuse helps with compile times (a smaller component can be reused in more projects, and more crates increase build parallelism).

It makes testing easier. Rust doesn't have enough dynamic monkey-patching for mocking of objects, so testing of code buried deep in a monolith is tricky. Splitting code into small libraries surfaces interfaces that are easily testable in isolation.

It helps with semver. A semver-major upgrade of one large library that everyone uses requires everyone to upgrade the whole thing at the same time, which can stall like the Python 2-to-3 transition. Splitting a monolith into smaller components allows versioning them separately, so the stable parts stay stable, and the churning parts affect smaller subsets of users.

However, don't make the mistake of thinking that Rust has a small standard library. Read any Rust release and you'll see dozens of new APIs added with every single one. I'm tempted to paste the entire list of stabilized APIs from the most recent release for emphasis, but rather than making this comment three dozen lines longer, just look for yourself: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/04/16/Rust-1.95.0/#stabilize...

In particular, most recently the aforementioned release stabilized the cfg_select! macro for convenient conditional compilation, which obviates the popular cfg_if crate: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/macro.cfg_select.html

One of my other crates (getaddrinfo) requires windows-sys and libc which would be challenging to get rid of.

I like the idea of low deps but zero is tough

https://crates.io/crates/ctor/1.0.4/dependencies

“Personally for rust I’m a proponent of the foundation supporting a few core crates that go under the same audit procedure as the main rust language and give funding to the project to limit supply chain vulns. I don’t think the right answer is to remove systems like crates or npm. Crate and npm are a boon for many developers.”

This is my solution. We get the quality of a std lib without forcing it in the std Lib and without extra maintaining cost for the team

My argument would be that if a more featureful standard library could get Rust closer to the superior dependency culture of Go, it'd be worth it. As-is, Rust dependency trees are just wild.

Also, I think that your example of Go's breaking crypto changes misses the forest for the trees--the stdlib has been incredibly stable through its history, and the vast majority of packages just never have to worry about it. I'm honestly not aware of a language out there with similar adoption, featureset, and robustness. More to the point, I'm not aware of a language out there with a more reliable stdlib that permits the ecosystem to have small dependency graphs.

    curl ... | bash

Amateur.

From a real repo, with 186K stars... https://github.com/obra/superpowers

curl | sudo dd of=/dev/sda

"... old laptop, and 'something Kubernetes threw up that looked important' were stolen from his apartment ..."

was related to:

"... enters his nmp credentials on the phishing site ..."

Then I suppose it is really interesting.

Hacker uses AI to research countries without extradition to US.

Cops use AI to analyze ransom note. Unfortunately, because the note confidently states that Vietnam has no extradition to the US, the AI recommends paying ransom.

Vietnam's currency, the Dong, confused the AI..

Kindly advice

the kubernetes reveal had me literally in tears

The dreaded Marcus Chen strikes again.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1o3b4q2/just_rece...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47153675

If I am somehow wrong I would salivate at a chance to see the input.

Whether (or to what extent) he uses AI to generate the content he posts is a valid question.

I agree with your earlier reasoning that this is far more clever than anything I’ve seen AI produce yet. Lots of AI humor is dad-joke level at best. If it is AI then he’s trained it on a hand-curated collection of top-shelf satire.

Pangram indeed claims the OP is 76% AI-generated. It has "high confidence" (EDIT: some parts are "medium confidence") that the early portions of the text were created by AI, and "medium confidence" that some of the later potions were written by a human. EDIT: I was especially dismayed to see that the dog might have been an AI creation :(

When I use the "supporting evidence" option, the main piece of evidence Pangram provides is the frequent use of em-dashes. Each timestamp is followed by an em-dash. Personally I think the em-dashes could be a copy-pasted em-dash or inserted by a markdown to HTML converter. nesbitt.io is apparently using Jekyll [0] - any Jekyll users know anything about this??

Pangram's "supporting evidence" feature also considers → and € to be "unusual Unicode".

Personally, to me it looks like the "supporting evidence" feature still needs some work because Pangram's AI detection is probably a lot more sophisticated than a grep for Unicode symbols. In fact the feature even has a notice claiming that "These patterns aren't used to determine our AI score; they help you see why AI text often reads differently."

As for the rest of the OP's content, it would be interesting to compare the Pangram results to a timeline of a real vulnerability. I tried doing so, but exhausted my free "Pangram credits" - apparently the first 1000 words of this article [1] about the log4j vulnerability is considered 100% human.

[0] https://github.com/andrew/nesbitt.io

[1] https://www.csoonline.com/article/571797/the-apache-log4j-vu...

ahahaha like that fiverr cloudinary bucket leak that turned out to just be a UX issue, this has me rolling

and then become aware of each other

and then try to eliminate each other for decades

each escalating resource capture and writing new generations of better "AI"