* 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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...
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
43 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 61.8 ms ] thread* 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)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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...
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.
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)
Using a proper sandboxing(https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox) regularly will drastically limit the blast radius of these attacks.
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-...
Skynet is winning now.