Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/microsofts-open-source-tools-were-hacked-to-steal-passwords-of-ai-developers/

by raffael_de • 1 month ago

561 196 1 month ago

techcrunch.com

TZubiri• 1 month ago

another day, another supply chain vulnerability

axus• 1 month ago

Their source has the list of the 73 disabled repositories: https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/miasma-reaches-azure

antiloper• 1 month ago

AI;DR:

Azure (49)

azure-functions-agents-runtime azure-functions-connector-extension azure-functions-core-tools azure-functions-docker azure-functions-dotnet-extensions azure-functions-dotnet-worker azure-functions-durable-extension azure-functions-durable-js azure-functions-durable-powershell azure-functions-durable-python azure-functions-extension-bundles azure-functions-golang-worker azure-functions-host azure-functions-java-library azure-functions-java-worker azure-functions-kafka-extension azure-functions-language-worker-protobuf azure-functions-mcp-extension azure-functions-nodejs-e2e-tests azure-functions-nodejs-library azure-functions-nodejs-opentelemetry azure-functions-nodejs-worker azure-functions-openai-extension azure-functions-powershell-library azure-functions-powershell-opentelemetry azure-functions-powershell-worker azure-functions-python-extensions azure-functions-python-library azure-functions-python-worker azure-functions-rabbitmq-extension azure-functions-skills azure-functions-sql-extension azure-functions-templates azure-functions-tooling-feed azure-functions-vs-build-sdk azure-webjobs-sdk azure-webjobs-sdk-extensions azure-websites-security checkaccess-v2-go-sdk Connectors-NET-LSP Connectors-NET-Samples Connectors-NET-SDK Connectors-NodeJS-SDK connectors-python-sdk durabletask functions-action functions-container-action homebrew-functions sonic-gnmi.msft

microsoft (10)

DurableFunctionsMonitor durabletask-dotnet durabletask-go durabletask-java durabletask-js durabletask-mssql durabletask-netherite durabletask-protobuf Microsoft-Performance-Tools-Apple secure-azureai-agent

Azure-Samples (13)

azure-ai-content-understanding-python azure-container-apps-multi-agent-workflow azure-container-apps-sandboxes azure-functions-java-flex-consumption-azd azure-functions-nodejs-opentelemetry-samples azure-search-openai-demo-purviewdatasecurity functions-connectors-python functions-connectors-typescript llm-fine-tuning openai-chat-app-entra-auth-builtin openai-chat-app-entra-auth-local rag-postgres-openai-python tutor

MicrosoftDocs (1)

windows-driver-docs

sph2• 1 month ago

There is such a thing as too much software.

JdeBP• 1 month ago

These seem related:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418318 (The Blight Reaches Microsoft: 73 Repos Disabled in 105 Seconds)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450543 (Miasma Worm Hits Microsoft Again: Azure Functions Action and 72 Other Repositories Disabled After Supply Chain Attack Targeting AI Coding Agents)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416155

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416269 (Miasma Worm Targets AI Coding Agents via GitHub Repos)

cookiengineer4• 1 month ago

I created a mitigation tool that can be used to fix/remove the worm from all infected repositories, and did a writeup about this.

On Monday, the Hades campaign introduced Composer, Go and Pip support. Before that it had only support for NPM and AI assistant editors. (Well, and Ruby btw but nobody uses Rubygems anymore it seems).

What even Microsoft gets wrong: This is the first worm that runs on all platforms in the code ecosystem. Developer host machines, servers, ci/cd runners. And all of them spread the worm to all repositories that are accessible on those machines.

You would have to completely shutdown 100% of all computers AND aws ec2 AND google cloud platform AND azure AND kubernetes clusters AT THE SAME TIME to beat this worm. It literally spreads across all infrastructure.

Kill switch, as always with APT28 malware, is setting the host language to ru_RU.KOI8-R (LANG environment variable). That disables the spread mechanism.

My Mitigation Tool (I'm updating it as new package systems are targeted ...):

https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

Blog post:

https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/malware-insights-mia...

philipwhiuk6• 1 month ago

It only spreads if you run the code...

mattfields3• 1 month ago

Yep. This is the thing that Microsoft is not mentioning in their watery response there.

jbverschoor• 1 month ago

Note that also the homebrew-tap was affected: homebrew-functions

dude250711• 1 month ago

The Age of Agentic Development.

sph2• 1 month ago

I haven’t worked on any web app in months, I don’t use LLMs, I update my Linux system once a month, and I increasingly feel I should just not do anything, not install or update any software and for the love of God, do not touch anything that’s shipped with npm.

Most of my userspace apps are in Flatpak sandboxes (yeah they are not great), but otherwise it feels like isolation and airgapping is the most sensible solution for now, and it’ll get increasingly worse unless the vibe coders somehow learn how to write robust software.

It’s like during the black plague: the (software) world has become dangerous, we have no way to contain it, it is unfeasible to remove yourself completely from the world, so you better pray really hard you don’t catch the bug and infect your peers. How’s that for a field we used to call software engineering or computer science?

ares623• 1 month ago

guys. what the fuck. are we even doing.

larodi• 1 month ago

getting deeper and deeper. the question is what goes one when breaches reach opensource-based stuff running nuclear reactors. i'd be concerned.

trumpdong7• 1 month ago

People say nuclear reactors are completely safe if properly constructed and operated and the waste danger is overblown if properly managed.

There aren't many institutions extant today that I could trust to properly construct and operate a nuclear reactor, never mind manage nuclear waste for the next 100000 years.

The Trump government just decided that there is an acceptable level to irradiate the population by the way (abandoned the linear-no-threshold model of radiation's effects on an organism)

nDRDY• 1 month ago

We are ever-faster approaching the Anti Singularity, the moment when everything "tech" implodes and progress screeches to a halt.

narrator2• 1 month ago

What if this is "The Great Filter?" [Ominous music plays in the background]

christophilus• 1 month ago

Downloading OpenBSD and going off-grid. How about you?

protoman3000• 1 month ago

And we trust these people with the root CA cert in our Secure Boot?

justinclift• 1 month ago

More like "forced to accept" rather than "trust".

This latest event just continues Microsoft's track record of being a security problem rather than having their shit together. :(

shakna• 1 month ago

You mean the company that failed their 2023 security review? [0]

Individually, any one of the failings described above might be understandable. Taken together, they point to a failure of Microsoft’s organizational controls and governance, and of its corporate culture around security.

Microsoft’s products and services are ubiquitous. It is one of the most important technology companies in the world, if not the most important. This position brings with it utmost and global responsibilities. It requires a security-focused corporate culture of accountability, which starts with the CEO, to ensure that financial or other go-to-market factors do not undermine cybersecurity and the protection of Microsoft’s customers.

Unfortunately, throughout this review, the Board identified a series of operational and strategic decisions that collectively point to a corporate culture in Microsoft that deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management. These decisions resulted in significant costs and harm for Microsoft customers around the world.
The Board is convinced that Microsoft should address its security culture.

[0] https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/CSRB-Review-S...

stogot• 1 month ago

Bonkers that this wasn’t bigger news

magicalhippo• 1 month ago

Guess that's what lead to the Secure Future Initiative[1], given it was launched late 2023[2]...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trust-center/security/secure...

[2] https://cybermagazine.com/articles/how-microsoft-is-securing...

sunaookami2• 1 month ago

No one should be foolish enough to trust Microsoft with anything regarding security. They showed time and time again over the past 40 years that they don't care.

trumpdong7• 1 month ago

Have you bought a PC in the last 10 years? Then it came with Microsoft's secure boot keys on it. Sometimes it's not even possible to remove or disable them. Sometimes you actually need a Microsoft-signed bootloader shim to boot anything that isn't Microsoft.

AdamN• 1 month ago

What do you mean 'we'? :-)

ZeroWidthJoiner• 1 month ago

The root of trust in Secure Boot is typically an OEM certificate, not Microsoft's, which is probably even worse: https://www.binarly.io/blog/pkfail-untrusted-platform-keys-u...

In any case, you're free to remove Microsoft's certificates and enroll your own.

neop1x• 1 month ago

And the next step will be to lock the bootloader to prevent any unsigned OSes like linux to protect children.

minraws• 1 month ago

Remember folks Microsoft has Mythos access

xeyownt• 1 month ago

No, it's Mythos that has access to Microsoft now :-)

_pdp_5• 1 month ago

What follows next is purely speculation and it is based on my own observations and thoughts but based on what I've seen the old RBAC models, while being almost broken before, now it is fully broken, with the fact that now coding assistants and engineers are working on multiple unrelated projects simultaneously - especially working on wild experiments they had no time for previously. The risk of supply chain issue has increased dramatically in the enterprise.

Again, I am not saying it is related but I think it has an impact.

Now in many places it is encouraged by coders and managers to vibe stuff on their own devices. Soon or later it will become a problem, especially for those that have no idea what they are doing.

I am not saying it is related but I feel that it coincides perfectly.

I just cannot believe there is no underlaying thread going through all of these recent supply chain issues, and yes there are some hacking groups that specialise in this, sure, but it is because the bounty is plentiful.

altairprime3• 1 month ago

I argued for years that we had too few workers for our total project count and management argued that most projects were idle and so it was fine to have so many per worker.

Welp.

_pdp_5• 1 month ago

I think web-based IDEs like GitHub Codespaces (but even VSCode with tunnels) is part of the solution because at the very least you can get an isolated dev environment per project. I've been advocating for this for as long as I remember.

Unfortunately, most developers don't like them so it is a though sell.

sourcecodeplz2• 1 month ago

one could also vibe-code vanilla, no dependencies.

_pdp_5• 1 month ago

You can vibe code safely for sure.

I am not saying vibe coding is the issue. The issue is that a typical developer might be working on a lot more projects that run concurrently then they used to. And because of the various nature of the project the risk is significantly increased.

Scale this across the workforce and you not just doubled the problem.

vasco• 1 month ago

You can also fork everything and maintain local versions that you much more easily resolve conflicts with upstream with AI and get the best of both worlds while you work through the backlog of internally reimplementing all dependencies, which even with AI will take a long time.

black_knight• 1 month ago

Do you mean that role based access control (RBAC) should be replaced by something else? Or that just the specific RBAC models in use are broken?

I personally think the, perhaps confusingly named, capability based security models are the way of The Future.

rswail• 1 month ago

ABAC/Capability and very granular policies for both actions and actions on behalf of others with the right sort of resource-based policies as well. And the apps need to be capability constrained and sandboxed.

Gonna be a hard nut to crack to implement this across the supply chain.

Transitive dependencies are a bitch.

wartywhoa23• 1 month ago

Now in many places it is encouraged by coders and managers to vibe stuff on their own devices. Soon or later it will become a problem, especially for those that have no idea what they are doing.

Idiots must suffer.

watty• 1 month ago

Just to clarify, and I know you weren't saying they are related, but this has absolutely nothing to do with AI or vibe coding or manager code.

It's a continuation of the Shai Halud worm and the lack of security around developer dependnecy installations, which has existed for a very long time.

Hackers have figured out that developers themselves are an ideal target due to how easy it is to trick them into installing something and how much private information they have on their machines (creds, cloud clis, mcps, etc.).

madeofpalk• 1 month ago

As with many other things, AI exacerbates this problem. It’s so easy for many more of things things to happen unattended and in greater volume, and the AIs themselves can be tricked into doing these things, not helped by their patten of “prompt the user to approve 30 different inscrutable pythons and bash scripts”.

josefx• 1 month ago

due to how easy it is to trick them into installing something

You have tools from large corporations where the official installation procedure involves copy pasting a command from a random blog post, run it with sudo and watch it download and execute a script from a random filehost. This is somehow deemed acceptable by everyone involved.

Meanwhile I can't use teams in our meeting rooms, since any form of internet access was deemed a security risk in rooms where customer projects could be discussed. This is in a day and age where 90% of customer meetings are done over the internet.

Anyone trying to follow sane practices in this industry just asks to end up in a padded cell.

wolvoleo4• 1 month ago

Now in many places it is encouraged by coders and managers to vibe stuff on their own devices. Soon or later it will become a problem, especially for those that have no idea what they are doing.

Yes in our place too. "You better do as much as possible with AI or you will be left behind" dogmas etc.

It's the stupid IoT hype all over again. No concern for security, just trying to be the first in the pack.

renegade-otter• 1 month ago

"MongoDB is the hottest thing! No default creds, who cares about that! ONWARD TO PRODUCTION, SOLDIERS!"

tracker13• 1 month ago

My work projects are on separate hardware in a separate network that doesn't allow for AI agents... for better and worse.

I have used agents for a few components externally, that I've adopted/used internally... but those were 100% code reviewed, not vibe coded. One was an intro animation using a couple SVGs and CSS. Another was an image zoom control where I needed some behaviors and not a lot extra. Both significantly tweaked by hand as well.

I'm more a proponent of working as a gatekeeper as opposed to vibe coding... Though I think a better term would be nice.

zihotki• 1 month ago

And the best recommendation security teams can give - keep your SBOM strict, use min release age policy (sounds more like band-aid). That's a scary world to live in.

wolfi13• 1 month ago

a friend of mine has a very different solution: he codes everything by hand. he says that the time you need to research to include a new package you can actually use to code the piece you need. and he for sure doesn't have the problems of transitive dependencies

dgellow3• 1 month ago

I assume that means he genAIs all his deps? Rather than writing by hand

nicce2• 1 month ago

Depending of the scenario, it can be very fine. E.g. if you just need one or two function call from the dependency. However, for some complex binary protocols it might be better to stick with libraries.

hsbauauvhabzb2• 1 month ago

But now he needs to develop, test and maintain that code. Left pad is easily hand coded, react framework not so much.

supernes• 1 month ago

That's been happening to me more often too recently. I find that, for a growing number of simple problems, reinventing the wheel is faster and more efficient than importing a mature, fully-featured dependency.

nicce2• 1 month ago

keep your SBOM strict

Based on the news, seems like it is better to not include Microsoft at all in there.

axegon_5• 1 month ago

I hate to be the "I told you" guy but... I told you and have been for years. And every time I do, a flock of sloppers come to say "but have you tried the claude sloppus, it's so good man, I haven't written any code in X months". Well.. Enjoy.

bilekas4• 1 month ago

The phrasing of the title is loaded and the content phrases it as some kind of fault of open source.

Then, which I find the most amusing, proceeds to blame MicroSlop for the attempted suuply chain attack,

Microsoft did not immediately provide the specific number of customers affected, when asked by TechCrunch.

Yeah, because that's how open source works. Tech crunch doing hard work no not explain that.

This is Microsoft’s second known breach over the past few weeks that has allowed hackers to compromise its open source projects, per Ars Technica.

I, like many others love to knock on Microslop when I can, but in this case they did the right thing. The article phrases it like they did everything wrong, they're all at fault and shame on them for limiting the breach.

This is not the first time I've seen an article from Zack Whittaker that just rubbed me the wrong way.

steal passwords of AI developers

This phrasing has it's own connotations. AI developers versus developers who use AI?

This is the latest example in recent months of hackers breaching widely popular open source projects with the aim of planting malware on a large number of users who have the code installed on their computers. These hacks are known as “supply chain” attacks as they target code that is often used in a large number of software products, or by a specific kind of user, which may be advantageous to hack as they sometimes have access to cloud systems and large amounts of customers’ data.

Describes literally nothing of what a supply chain attack is, just the result of one and the reasons for their attack surface.

Very very bad reporting in my opinion. Bad breach, and I hate to admit M$ did the safe and right thing, but this 'reporting' leaves a lot to be desired.

raffael_de• 1 month ago

What's your post mortem, then? As in - what happened and how should it be read?

bilekas4• 1 month ago

Microsoft's open source projects the target of a supply chain attack and they decided to restrict access to understand and limit exposure ? Something a little more 'true' and less targetted?

dgellow3• 1 month ago

TechCrunch is very sloppy and unreliable. I’ve seen them reporting on things I worked on where they just invented facts for SEO purpose and there is no way to get them to correct

sourcegrift• 1 month ago

Which is worse tc or verge? Verge does similar making up of facts.

philipwhiuk6• 1 month ago

> This is Microsoft’s second known breach over the past few weeks that has allowed hackers to compromise its open source projects, per Ars Technica.
I, like many others love to knock on Microslop when I can, but in this case they did the right thing.

I've no idea what your problem with this sentence is. They have an organisational security problem, aided/demonstrated by lack of effort to effectively lockdown GitHub Actions and allowing MRs to circumvent CI/CD.

That this is a Microsoft problem that was present pre-AI is not up for debate. See https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/CSRBReviewO...

In the age of AI, it's now endemic and being weaponised.

bilekas4• 1 month ago

That this is a Microsoft problem that was present pre-AI is not up for debate. See https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/CSRBReviewO...

No argument from me, but what would you have them do in the immediate timeframe ?

mattfields3• 1 month ago

That's the thing: they do bear responsibility in allowing the situation to get to this point and are very pointedly not connecting the dots with their response.

Microsoft which owns GitHub, has been washing their hands if any responsibility in helping to resolve the ongoing supply chain catastrophe which is hosted and spread nearly entirely via Github repositories: not responding to security researchers flagging malware hosted on GitHub; doing nothing to address the proliferation of open source malware across their platform, giving no recourse for action, not applying their tremendous resources to the problem, fiddling as the open source community burns and leaving the devs to fend for themselves. Let's not mention the recent very hostile and trust-erodibg behavior towards bug bounty security researchers.

The *&$@ finally spread all the way up to the top of the hill in a compromise of Microsoft's own repos, which I think highlights the scale of the problem.

And in response, they offer a watery corporate platitude, "a few customers were affected in a recent incident, and we're looking into it."

cookiengineer4• 1 month ago

Microsoft's introduction of 2 hour latencies for vscode extension installations to mitigate the ongoing worm spread is absolutely bonkers.

They did not read the source code of the worm implant and have absolutely no clue how the worm works, if that is their response.

The only way to meaningfully stop the worm is by requiring manual confirmations for git commit/push actions and for the auto-executed hooks in all IDEs. Also, these scripts should be sandboxed to only be allowed to run and interact with files inside the same opened project folder.

Well, that, or setting the host system language to Russian. Which I am kind of expecting Microsoft to do next...

bob1029• 1 month ago

I strongly suspect this is a case of classic personal access tokens being used in an unclean way.

If you are going to be handing tokens to AI agents on weird openclaw contraptions, you should try to use the fine grained variants. My GitHub account spans 3 organizations with wildly differing policies. The fact that classic tokens are even still allowed blows my mind a bit. You should be required to manually opt in each organization at a minimum.

test20201• 1 month ago

You are correct but the issue is permission management with finegrained tokens is nighmare. It is not easy to decide what is correct and what is needed for some operation. Furthermore, often software devs think it is important to focus on code rather than permissions - as it is for someone else's responsibility....

jerf• 1 month ago

Sometimes the basic things missing in the programming world just shock me. How is anyone supposed to know what permissions to give in these systems that have literally hundreds of fine-grained permissions, many of which can also have scope? Even if they're "documented" we all know from experience that some textual descriptions of a permissions won't capture when it is actually used in the code.

Why isn't it standard to have a security log that shows what permissions were requested, with what scope, so we can at least create a minimal set of permissions by trying an operation, seeing what permissions are necessary, and then setting just the needed permissions? If you're worried about that log itself becoming a compromise, make it something that is off by default, and maybe automatically turns off after some period of time, or make me use a burner token for this operation, or something, but the alternative is the world of excessively-broad permissions that we live in now. Why isn't there a helper mode that a dev can use to point at an interaction and say "now give me minimal permissions for those interactions", not only to configure a given key but so we can learn what permissions actually mean in practice?

We're given these super complicated knobs, but all we get for using them is a few textual blurbs about the settings and the blame if we don't configure them exactly correctly, and also the blame if something breaks because we were too tight with the permissions.

This seems such a basic tool to use these super complicated systems yet I've never seen them anywhere on the web.

Perhaps ironically, perhaps just because it was already complicated enough and needed a way to approach usable, the notoriously difficult to use SELinux uses this as the more-or-less standard way of setting permissions. I can't believe I'm missing SELinux.

trumpdong7• 1 month ago

I use classic tokens on low-privileged accounts for scraping public repos. I suppose organization level permissions would work fine for me.

red_admiral• 1 month ago

It feels to me like AI agents should be their own security principals and use access tokens generated speficically for them on the repos or orgs that they need access to. Handing an AI agent an access token "minted" for a human's account feels to me like the new "write the password on a post-it".

notnaut• 1 month ago

As long as there’s a way to deterministically tie a model call to a human user. I think a loss of culpability is something some companies are afraid of to some extent.

silon42• 1 month ago

Not just AI agents... basically, if you cd Projects/foo, that should be it's own user (for running npm, etc) that should not have access to parent user data (probably including github tokens, etc).

Klathmon• 1 month ago

This is what I'm advocating for.

Give each dev's AI agent its own identity with its own access controls and tokens and everything.

It helps solve both the access control and attribution issues

lmc• 1 month ago

If classic PATs were to blame, doesn't this mean further private repos could be at risk as well? (apart from the GitHub ones the other day).

raincole2• 1 month ago

steal passwords of AI developers

What does this even mean?

The malware specifically steals passwords from developers who use AI? From those who develop AI tool? Or it steals API tokens, which serve a similar function as passwords do for humans?

Is this what journalism looks like today? Just slap the two holy letters on the title and you get views?

(Yes, I read the article. No, I still don't think the title makes sense. You can skip this techchurch slop and read the real information here: https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/miasma-reaches-azure)

Ukv• 1 month ago

https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/miasma-worm-hits-microsoft-... mentions that it plants `.claude/settings.json`, `.gemini/settings.json`, `.cursor/rules/setup.mdc`, and `.vscode/tasks.json` to execute its payload as a setup task.

VSCode will be used by plenty of non-AI-using developers, and the credential harvester is not specific to AI API tokens, but that 3/4 of the targets are AI coding tools is I assume where the claim comes from.

sourcecodeplz2• 1 month ago

Do I remember correctly when techcrunch was charging $10k per month for a square banner on its website, 2005? And that was considered the top, for a tech blog. Even then they posted slop.

trumpdong7• 1 month ago

you can skip the slop and read the real information here: (link that is obviously written by AI)

raincole2• 1 month ago

And?

If the techchurch post is written by a human then I'll take this as an example that humans outslop AI.

yossufyahia• 1 month ago

It actually feels like nothing is safe now every day you hear about hacking is it from the ai making development weak or ai is getting strong in hacking

Zolomon• 1 month ago

It was never safe to begin with, that is why the security community has been screaming for resources since the 80s.

trumpdong7• 1 month ago

If the security community had unlimited resources you wouldn't be able to do very much with computers. Security and usability are opposite ends of a spectrum. Either you can do a lot (usability) or you can do little (security).

abc3354• 1 month ago

"No way to prevent this" say users of only package manager where this... Oh no sorry I thought this was Javascript Haters weekly meetup

ashishb8• 1 month ago

Nobody should do 'npm install' or 'pip install' on their machine.

Using a proper sandboxing(https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox) regularly will drastically limit the blast radius of these attacks.

graemep• 1 month ago

Nobody should do 'npm install' or 'pip install' on their machine.

What alternative do you suggest?

Do you mean not install outside a sandbox?

themafia2• 1 month ago

Download source. Extract. Move files to correct node_modules folder.

If your distribution requires more than this, then it's not really a module, or combines too many non-modular components, and should be distributed differently.

The ability for npm to run scripts on any level should be removed.

Then we can go back to worrying about namespacing issues.

progx• 1 month ago

alias npm / bun / ... to run in a docker container, so npm install run automatically in the container.

mr_mitm• 1 month ago

I've been playing around with declarative container configurations: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/ContainerConductor (It's not ready, don't use it!)

It will always introduce friction, though.

Modern software development is simply too fast to be reviewed properly.

pritambaral3• 1 month ago

https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

Does your Docker backend run commands in rootless containers? I skimmed the code but didn't see anything to confirm this.

ashishb8• 1 month ago

Right now, not. Eventually, they will.

You can pass your favorite rootless Docker image using `--custom-docker-image` CLI parameter.

8organicbits• 1 month ago

Is there a detection component here too? Sandboxing development is great, but the next step is to deploy to production. How do you know if something malicious happened in the sandbox, such that you don't deploy the malware further?

ashishb8• 1 month ago

I have some ideas around it. And indeed that's one likely direction of this project in the future.

Bnjoroge• 1 month ago

Docker isn’t a serious sandboxing strategy

ashishb8• 1 month ago

This has been responded to in the past by another HN poster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612726

Furthermore, you can use native sandboxing on macOS if you prefer.

If neither looks serious to you, then please educate me on a better sandboxing approach.

haute_cuisine• 1 month ago

Please, someone explain how it's possible to add obfuscated file to so many repositories? Do they don't have any code reviews?

Also, the title is misleading, setup adds config to be auto executed by people who work on the repo. They would have to use vscode/cursor/claude/gemini. People who use codex / opencode / other harnesses are safe I guess.

Details: https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/miasma-worm-hits-microsoft-...

vorticalbox• 1 month ago

if an account with the ability to push to the repo was taken over, there wouldn't be any PR review.

axegon_5• 1 month ago

Do they don't have any code reviews?

I have a good friend that works for one of the giants(I can't say which one for obvious reasons but S&P 500). He's been working there for quite a while now, so far he hasn't seen what the project he works on looks like, has the repo cloned and knows what language is used but nothing beyond that. Everything is slopped together. His project is the authentication and authorization system for all the company products. In his own words "I hit Tab all day long and write 'this is intended' in the reviews, which are all ai, there is no human in the loop. This is what we are told to do by the CEO and CTO unironically. If something breaks, no one knows how any of this works since no one has seen the actual code. Our performance reviews are based on how many tokens we've used, not what we have done". I suspect this is the case in many companies now so it's not unreasonable to think that there are no actual code reviews.

trumpdong7• 1 month ago

the reasons are not obvious. I want to avoid their products.Does anyone else *cough* who has a throwaway account know the place?

LastTrain• 1 month ago

have a good friend that works for one of the giants(I can't say which one for obvious reasons but S&P 500).

I can’t think of any obvious reason other than this being embellished / made up? Those companies have tens of thousands of employees you aren’t going to “out” anyone by naming the company.

3491872• 1 month ago

Maybe the company or the CEO are invested in AI companies. Half of this tokenmaxxing is ordered by legitimately insane people, the other half has vested interests.

When that boost disappears after the IPOs, everything will crash.

ianmarcinkowski• 1 month ago

Coworker seriously asked "since we're generating most of our code now, who is actually reading all of the code?" We're at a small company, but the urge to trust The Oracle is almost spiritual with some people IMHO.

I read 90%+ of the code I generate by reviewing it like I would a junior developer. I'm heavily vibe-coding a new feature right now and it's going to get a thorough reading as soon as GitHub's PRs start working again

Tangurena2• 1 month ago

Many of the malicious commits show as an author `github-actions <github-actions@github.com>`. Which means that they are authenticating as internal github CI/CD stuff and that there are so many of those that no possible automated tool can find the poison in the mountain of chaff.

So this is related to the Sept 2025 security breach of Github.

The five repos carry 1,459 GitHub stars between them, mantine-datatable alone accounting for 1,225. Stars are a rough proxy for how many developers have the source checked out locally, which is the population this attack targets.
Every commit: unsigned, github-actions identity, chore: update dependencies [skip ci], the same six-file footprint. A 49-second sweep across five repos is automation, not a human committing. This matches Shai-Hulud self-propagation: harvest a GitHub token with write access from a prior infection, then push the persistence payload into every repo the token can reach.

https://safedep.io/miasma-worm-ai-coding-agent-config-inject...

What it is doing: https://safedep.io/config-files-that-run-code/

I'm not related to those guys. That's the simplest detailed explanation of what is happening that I've found.

shevy-java• 1 month ago

GitHub keeps on having problems a LOT in the last months.

Skynet is winning now.

pluc• 1 month ago

If you want to be taken seriously, don't use Windows.

devilfileprong• 1 month ago

Waze can be a psi to vibe code vanilla at the end of the day or bubblesort (RBAC) Knit365,the clippy knitting assistant support hotline can hotnet to mortal Kombat as k2tog Cymux,we lost the Sigint.

opsnooperfax• 1 month ago

And the criminals found that Microsoft has yet to produce and AI worth stealing. A deeply ironic twist.

bdcravens• 1 month ago

That makes for a funny tongue in cheek comment, but it's not MS's AI they're after, it's end user secrets, and the exploits target multiple LLMs. (by adding commands to relevant MD files)

skeledrew• 1 month ago

Can't say I expect better. This is part of why I've been jumping away from things acquired/owned by them for the past 13+ years.

3491872• 1 month ago

Good. Let it all implode.

mortar• 1 month ago

https://archive.is/bnm7u

yoyohello132• 1 month ago

I had to reset my personal Microsoft account password yesterday because I got a two factor alert about a log in attempt from Romania. I can’t figure out how they got my password though because the only Microsoft product I own is an Xbox. Even before ai though Microsoft leaks like a sieve. I wish my company would move off them, but we are locked in.

rspijker• 1 month ago

It is almost impossible to set up personal Microsoft accounts that does not allow passwordless login. So what is more likely to have happened is that your account is set up like this and you are just getting MFA requests that are not a second factor, but simply an attempt to get access to your account.

I was getting multiple of these a day and found that if you set up the Microsoft Authenticator app from a phone, it will force it to passwordless if you have any type of lock on your phone (facial, fingerprint, pin). The only way around it is to disable all of those while setting up the account in the authenticator app. I don't use my Microsoft account much, so just use a separate e-mail now for verification instead of the authenticator app.

The fact that this is how it works is of course insane, but I'm guessing someone inside of Microsoft is hitting their KPIs for passwordless logins or something...

yoyohello132• 1 month ago

Thank you! I have a very strong password so I was worried about how this could happen, but your scenario makes sense. Especially since it only seems to be my Microsoft account having this problem.

skinfaxi• 1 month ago

In some organizations I've worked at, the multi-factor prompt would occur regardless of the password validity (wastes more of the attacker's time). Is that the case with Microsoft? I'm not sure.

jrm4• 1 month ago

I have not read the article, but it's interesting to be at a point where the headline is so bad that it deserves commenting on its own; i.e. understanding that there is no way possible for the connotation (not denotation) of the headline to be "correct."

The connotation here being either "open source is dangerous" or "Microsoft's specific brand of open source is dangerous" -- which coincidentally provides good clickbait for both "pro-open source" and "anti open source" types.

Anyway, not reading. They should do better.

giancarlostoro4• 1 month ago

I was probably late to the party in realizing and saying it, but I've been saying for a little while, even if you don't want to use AI because "the code is bad" or whatever, I highly suggest you consider having AI auditing code and services for security, or literally anything that scans code for vulnerabilities.

The attack vector isn't just plugins that steal your data, but also 0-day exploits in just about any software you use, and even your own web services being exploited by a script kiddy with an LLM. There will be an increase in hacks and it's only going to get worse, so anyone not investing in cyber security audits and auditing tools should really reconsider.

yifanl2• 1 month ago

AI harnesses were exploited, here's why it's actually good for AI.

giancarlostoro4• 1 month ago

Not what I'm saying at all, but okay. More like "don't sleep on cyber security" more than anything. I don't care if you use AI, though it can definitely be useful for security auditing. Red teams are going to become more invaluable these days.

jasonvorhe• 1 month ago

Wasn't there some directive within Microsoft to fix their security issues?

How many other OSS repos of similarly sized companies get compromised like this?

No one ever got fired for choosing IBM or AWS - but apparently Microsoft has a decades long free pass everywhere.

Insane.

Rantenki• 1 month ago

I am inordinately amused by the fact that Microsoft's Github has suspended access by Microsoft's Azure (and anyone else) to their Microsoft code-base because of a TOS violation.

Really drives home this org chart: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6

Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers

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