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Comment by louislang | Hacker News Reader

Awesome seeing this posted! Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Phylum.

This campaign is ongoing. Our system just notified us of two more packages, which have been reported to PyPI. I expect this list to continue to grow throughout the day.

As a related aside, we are working on a package sandbox that prevents access to disk, network and env variables during package installation. It's not quite ready for primetime, but it is completely open source and we'd love some early feedback/contributions!

https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

If anyone has any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them!

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interesting read. i was a bit confused at first, thinking that the malicious package names were being inserted into cut and pasted pip/apt/etc install strings. i see now that's not happening in this scenario, but curious if that behavior has ever been observed.

We haven't seen this particular sort of thing just yet in packages. There was a similar attack from a few years ago called "pastejacking" that did something directionally similar to what you're suggesting though!

Cool project! Phylum looks useful at addressing a few worries I have with Python. Would it work in a mostly air-gapped environment, or does it have to call home regularly?

We are basically ingesting and analyzing every package as it gets published to the various ecosystems (currently NPM, PyPI, Rubygems, Maven and Nuget; Go and Crates support landing in beta soon).

This is currently offered as a SaaS solution, but we'll be providing an on-prem offering by EOY that should work well in an air-gapped environment.

The sandbox I mentioned above is rolled into our CLI by default, but that should operate well enough on its own without needing to call out to our API if you wanted!

Thanks Louis, I’ll keep an eye out for it!

no problem, happy to chat whenever!

How does Phylum detect these issues? I guess you have a mirror of PyPI and run some kind of scanner over all the code?

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