Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES

550 points140 comments17 hours ago
lynndotpy

For anyone confused, this is (very good imo) fiction about supply-chain incidents. It had me very worried during a brief scan that it was real though, which made me read it more attentively :)

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athrowaway3z

> Day 1, 14:47 UTC — Among the exfiltrated credentials: the maintainer of vulpine-lz4, a Rust library for “blazingly fast Firefox-themed LZ4 decompression.” The library’s logo is a cartoon fox with sunglasses. It has 12 stars on GitHub but is a transitive dependency of cargo itself.

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

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david_shaw

It's easy to be cynical because, yes, both the problems and solutions seem dead obvious in hindsight. But for a long time (and maybe even still), a hacker creed was "move fast and break things."

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.

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ObiKenobi

The maintainer of left-justify receives his YubiKey from yubikey-official-store.net. It is a $4 USB drive containing a README that says “lol.”

Got me seriously laughing... Such a troll.

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albert_e

Brilliant satire. So many gems.

> CI passed because the malware installed volkswagen

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

ineedasername

>"The legitimate maintainer has won €2.3 million in the EuroMillions and is researching goat farming in Portugal..."

>"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.

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EdwardDiego

As a Fish aficionado (Afishionado?) - I feel both attacked and seen by this:

> 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.

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freakynit

Root Cause: "A dog named Kubernetes ate a YubiKey."

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..

red_admiral

This is the most SCP thing I've read in a while that's not actually an SCP.

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bpavuk

the Karen one gave me a good laugh :D ;) reminds me of a `make`-based build script I once got when reviewing a classmate's project - it attempted to `rm -rf` my home folder if the hostname contains `bpavuk`. that was in seventh grade!!

vsgherzi

Supply chain incidents suck and we need to do better. 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.

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mac3n

good thing I don't use npm or pip, just the recommended

    curl ... | bash
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jruohonen

If this:

"... 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.

simon84

Link this with the fact that anyone can use any name/email in commits and appear as the legitimate contributor on GitHub and it completes the chain. Love it :)

wodahs1

Maintainer uses AI to find Yubikey's site.

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..

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swiftcoder

Very enjoyable read, entirely too close to the mark

notnmeyer

the fact that this could easily pass as real says a lot about the state of things.

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abbaselmas

A clickbait title should be: "A dog named Kubernetes ate a YubiKey."

lschueller

Please someone make a mockumentary out of this.

nikanj

Customers give us heat for not shipping the latest vulpine-lz4. Their AI-based heuristic antivirus total defence solution automatically flags all software not running latest versions of everything

Kindly advice

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baq

my sides

the kubernetes reveal had me literally in tears

f4c39012

'The changelog reads “performance improvements.”' was the truest part for me. Surely what we're releasing is the most fundamental thing to understand, yet almost every single app update I see is this or something jokey that really means "don't know" or "don't care"

danielfalbo

absolutely hilarious, made me laugh a lot. thank you for writing this, whether human or AI.

mrinterweb

left-justify !! LOL. History really does repeat its self. Remember left-pad supply chain security panic?

TZubiri

This would have been completely avoided if you were using bun dependency vector locking in Nix.

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danilocesar

This week has been tough. Is it the begging of CVEgeddon?

worthless-trash

Not a valid CVE number.

bakugo

> Day 1, 03:14 UTC — Marcus Chen, maintainer of left-justify

The dreaded Marcus Chen strikes again.

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

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

bklosky

According to Pangram, this is likely AI generated, surprised that no one has pointed this out

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somebudyelse

Too soon

quxuejun

nice

yieldcrv

> unrelated security researcher publishes a blog post titled “I found a supply chain attack and reported it to all the wrong people.”

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

ck2

imagine a future where white-hat vs black-hat "AI" go around the web trying to patch vs exploit 0-days

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"

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