HN user
I've updated the timeline to clarify I did in fact email them. I’m not yet at the point of having Claude write my emails for me, in fact it was my first one sent since joining the company 10 months ago!
I went to read the advisory post and chose double clicking it from Finder instead of vim for whatever reason. I was actually on a call with my manager as it happened, I had time to watch my computer start to freeze up again and say my goodbyes before the inevitable hard reset!
I’ve entertained myself with CTF walkthroughs on YouTube before and had been meaning to try it out. But yeah I feel it falls under the same category as lock picking, fun to LARP, unlikely to stumble across in my day job.
The best part was that I didn't even mean to ask Claude who to contact! I was still in disbelief that I was one of the first people affected, so I asked for existing reports on the assumption that if it was real I definitely wasn't the first.
The fork-bomb part still seems really weird to me. A pretty sophisticated payload, caught by missing a single `-S` flag in the subprocess call.
I’m a big proponent of it within our company! CC tried to style it to blend in with our blog but it was kind of a disaster. Definitely had a new appreciation for the out-of-the-box experience. I also tried to include the individual sub-pages of Claude investigating but it really trawled my whole machine looking for malware. Don’t know if you’ve thought of any systematic ways of redacting the endless pages of detailed logs?
So I've been thinking about this a lot since it happened. I've already added dependency cooldowns https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/04/package-managers-need-to-cool-... to every part of our monorepo. The obvious next thought is "am I just dumping the responsibility onto the next person along"? But as you point out it just needs to give automated scanners enough time to pick up on obvious signs like the .pth file in this case.
Callum here, I was the developer that first discovered and reported the litellm vulnerability on Tuesday. I’m sharing the transcript of what it was like figuring out what was going on in real time, unedited with only minor redactions.
I didn’t need to recount my thought process after the fact. It’s the very same ones I wrote down to help Claude figure out what was happening.
I’m an ML engineer by trade, so having Claude walk me through exactly who to contact and a step by step guide of time-critical actions felt like a game-changer for non-security researchers.
I'm curious whether the security community thinks more non-specialists finding and reporting vulnerabilities like this is a net positive or a headache?
Initial person to report the malware to PyPI here. My cynical take is that it doesn't really matter how tightly scoped the agent privileges are if the human is still developing code outside of containers, with .env files lying around for the taking. I agree about agents not yet having the instincts to check suspicious behaviour. It took a bit of prodding for my CC to dig deeper and not accept the first innocent explanation it stumbled on.
Dev who submitted the PyPI report here. I hear what you're saying, but in this case it was all human error that got me. It was a mix of getting too comfortable with uvx installing all dependencies on startup, and Cursor running my uvx-built plugins automatically in the background. Meaning I didn't even type the install command myself, yet no agents involved.
Yep my coworker hnykda, first reply confirming the report, got his account deleted for a while earlier. Definitely not the best way of handling this...