cookiengineer

That's the culprit, because LLMs tend to forget and remove a lot of branch logic in these kinds of tasks. If unit tests don't cover these specific if/elseif/else cases, then they'll just disappear.

They'll also disappear if the LLM is allowed to modify the unit tests, because they sure like to cheat their way around into greenlit test suites. The agentic environment must disallow write access to the unit test files for the agent that writes the code.

If you implement that in your tools, you'll see quickly how the models will try to rewrite the unit tests at all cost, no matter what kind of prompting you've done. Tool policies are the only boundary to successfully guarantee this.

Source: Am building my own agentic environment because of that behavior

Experienced Go devs that stay inside the ecosystem try to write their libraries as "pure go" libraries with zero dependencies other than the upstream core libraries (or golang.org/x if needbe), which results in a very low maintenance ecosystem. This combined with the strong toolchain makes it joyful to work with.

I still don't agree with a lot of design choices of the language, but I realize that I can be more efficient if I am setting aside my opinion.

And that's exactly the thing that somehow never happened in the Rust ecosystem. I always joke that the Rust ecosystem has more OpenGL bindings than developers, because there's just so many low quality bindings or wrappers out there that the ecosystem in result got too noisy to maintain.

I don't want to write more (verbose) code. I want to write less.

I kind of already know that my comment goes to shit in terms of downvotes, but that's what I expect while writing this. How dare I criticized Rust as a language? How dare I, a fulltime noob, do this? Rust is better, always!

...the Rust ecosystem is just so effing toxic. I am glad that I left it. I just got tired of being angry at random online things all the time. Go is my happy place where my annoyances are reduced to Cgo, maps, and the unsafe package <3

The latter licenses I choose now only for things I absolutely don't care about and won't spend any time on. Things that I care about I license under AGPL. If someone wants it fixed by paying development time, great, then just offer it dual-licensed AGPL/EULA.

There's lots of different forms and shapes of wave breakers, like the Tetrapods [1] that you can find over here across pretty much every coast in Europe.

Maybe I'm just not getting it why the Dolosse shape is superior?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapod_(structure)

In the crypto bubble I used the opportunity to remove all that noise from my stream. Unsubbed from everyone with Crypto in their job title with no regrets. Doing the same for AI thought leaders helped reduce the noise a bit further.

I like to keep my LinkedIn stream non AI generated, so if I see an AI generated post with all those shitty unicode bold letters, I'm just unfollowing and removing them from my connections.

Now I get the real value out of LinkedIn, which is spammers and advertisers that have a LinkedIn Pro subscription that I cannot unsubscribe from. Yay! /s

Jokes aside, you should reflect on how and for what you are using social media. Every second you spend reading there is likely a second wasted that you can spend building or doing what you enjoy. Social media is an attention grabbing business model, and your lifetime is too precious to waste it on...that.

Every time I was opening social media in the past I am now doing a little bit of sports outside to reset my brain. Much more fun to be in the green than in the digital noise world.

Did you know that Michelangelo was the first "label" for inventions and art? He sourced his material from other people and published it for them.

So it's kinda ironic (maybe on purpose?) that you mentioned him.

Name a single instance of right wing parties that did not violate all human rights the second they got in power. Name one, I dare you.

And no, historically such a fairytale world does not exist that you're trying to paint here. All right wing parties feed off aggression, painting humans as enemies, and populistic lies. It's always been this way, always will be this way.

Not a Mullvard customer anymore, and going to never recommend you again for any person that asks me in the future.

Go to history class if you still can't see the truth in my comment. I'm German, and that's our fucked up history, and our messed up ancestry of people "that just followed orders" that I have zero tolerance for. Your fairytale comment reads like the "Hitler just wants peace" protests during WW2.

There is always a democratic and peaceful option, and right wing parties never choose that option. It's unsystematic to how they fundamentally work.

It's tons of fun, and runs in wine, too. Typical quirk is that the profile folder has to be setup before running it (same bug as with old generals.exe versions). But can be played easily with wireguard over the internet.

[1] https://www.moddb.com/mods/generalszero-hour-continue

Fun fact that is missing in US history education: Hitler was a legally elected chancellor.

Don't skip history class, kids.

Do I need to remind you how LLMs are being trained? ...or that Anthropic claimed their codebase is 100% vibecoded, making it uncopyrightable by their own logic? ...or that Anthropic took down all Claude Code leaks they could find using DMCA takedown notices? ...or how do you think the caching mechanisms work when there's allegedly no data stored to be able to cache it?

I'm just saying. Anything you build with online models is their training data anyways. Assuming otherwise is pretty stupid at this point.

kids these days... stares at the C64 in the corner

The problem of everchanging malware isn't fixable by global policies and global rulesets. Package managers need to change to different workflows in the package publishing process.

1. Reproducible builds have to be mandatory

2. Deployed packages have no execution or network capability at install time

3. If package artifacts differ from source artifacts, block it temporarily

4. In order to defend against credentials harvesting: Package managers need to have mandatory container or sandbox isolation (mandatory bubblewrap, podman, or whatever isolation that segregates filesystems and networking)

5. In order to defend against github being abused as a C2 infrastructure: Package managers need to have locked behavioral rulesets of packages, "allow filesystem" or "allow networking" is useless, and needs to be per-resource. Additionally, it needs to be a mandatory allowlist-only enforcement. If it's allowed by default, it won't help with the transitive dependencies problem

6. Introduced transitive dependencies need to be locked and signed by the package repository authority.

7. In order to defend against eBPF Rootkit: Sorry, you're just f'cked. The only EDR on the market that defends against this attack surface is literally my own product (that I won't advertise here). Every other available tooling is just too outdated in how it has been developed, and too outdated how it's doing behavioral analytics of malware.

---

My personal take on this:

Pretty much every developer thinks this isn't necessary and is probably gonna downvote me for telling the security perspective here. This is not about what's necessary, this is about what's broken.

Our existing DevOps and DevSecOps culture and the involved incident response/supply chain security/GRC/etc workflows are absolutely broken against these reoccurring supply chain attacks, and the tooling that promised to catch this is also absolutely broken and useless against mutating malware that's co-generated by LLMs.

The only ones actually re-identifying the malware implants as miasma malware samples correctly were the socket.dev folks. Every other supply chain tool vendor was just bragging about a new malware campaign because they weren't up to speed and seemingly didn't know about the initial miasma campaigns (and the prototype campaign targeting RedHat's NPM packages with the gyp bindings).

Microsoft was so useless in its incident response workflow that they tried to mitigate the problem by making VSCode extension installs with a required delay time, not even having understood how the malware implants work, and not even having understood what the actual spread vector was.

It's like Microsoft had to press a red button just for the sake of having done anything, instead of openly communicating and advising to ongoing malware attacks, sharing intelligence and samples; and in consequence leaving every customer of Microsoft in the dark, getting compromised in the process, too.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

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

Raspberry Pi as a platform has revolutionized access to computers in my opinion, though since the RAM crisis started not so much anymore due to the insane price differences. But the Hackberry is the computing device where I think it has lots of potential for being my actual "Linux on the go" that I wanted but never got ... for the last 15(?) years waiting for it.

[1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5

CORS literally exists only against XSS and CSRF for actively logged in human users. Anything else in CORS is absolutely pointless because every other attack scenario uses scripts or programs that fake HTTP headers anyways. It's just as useless as the Sec-CH (client hint) headers because some Browser made by a company that starts with Micro and ends with Slop decided that the User Agent always needs to be Windows 10 for compatibility reasons.

That is why you see everyone just enabling every CORS option anyways, even though that is literally the worst case that allows XSS and CSRF. And a lot of websites have user edited content at some place, at the very least in images that aren't filtered for embedded scripts (PNGs, anyone?).

Mitigation Tool: https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

Blog Post with details: https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/malware-insights-mia...

Currently working on some networking parts, because I want multiple exocomp instances to be able to cooperate in terms of knowledge sharing and workforce sharing. So I'm experimenting with websockets combined with multicast DNS-SD via UDP sockets. Might be kinda nice if I can make all services discoverable and plug and play. Also using DNS-SD for my llama.cpp wrapper already, which allows local model and inference service discovery quite nicely already.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/exocomp

[2] https://github.com/cookiengineer/gooey

No. It wouldn't have. That's the whole point of the miasma worm, because it changes too fast in its signatures and helper methods. The encrypted malware implant uses a changing AES-128-GCM key that's used to decrypt the payload, and that key is per-where-it-is-uploaded on GitHub. The code itself is dynamically renamed in its methods, re-used shuffled offsets for encrypted symbols, among other things. It's a mutating malware and the worst enemy from tools that rely on signatures.

Ironically, APT28/29 is somewhat relying on Microsoft being too slow to auto block users and repositories on GitHub that are the C2 infrastructure. Think about that for a second what this implies for your cyber strategy.

By the time you're able to scan signatures or "strings" you're already playing a cat and mouse game with a fully automated botnet, which you will never win. The only other ones I've observed during the last week that seem to be able to track this malware implant's changes were socket.dev. ALL other supply chain tools didn't even know about Miasma and re-invented it as a new campaign. They didn't have the skilled enough people nor toolchain to reverse the malware payload quickly enough to be able to keep up every 24h when they push out a new adapter for another ecosystem.

By fully automated I mean they're already using the credentials they stole less than 48 hours ago from a different package ecosystem, because the email addresses and names etc keep appearing from people who likely didn't even understand the impact of this self-spreading worm.

And having an IOC that checks for, let's say, any package that depends on bun won't help either because the malware will just use external means to re-download it. See the second PyPi campaign, where they just changed the dropper to use compressed WHL files and the setup.pth files that are auto-executed to download the dropper. They changed this after the PyPi maintainers flagged the first wave of malware droppers from the RedHat campaign.

As long as the package managers in those ecosystems aren't fully rewritten from scratch to accomodate for chroots, sandboxes, network and domain logs that are _only allowlistable per entry_ this won't change, and will stay being a feasible malware deployment strategy for supply chain attacks.

Repo for Mitigation Tool (I'm human so I play catch 21 with an LLM powered botnet) [1] ... Tech details in the blog post [2]

Also this is a problem across all package managers. Composer is also affected. Rubygems is also affected. NPM is also affected. PyPi is also affected. Go is also affected.

Nobody is talking about this, and I think this should be more openly discussed how much negligence and external trust we put in package managers in general. This really needs to change.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

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

But I think the only way to establish these laws would be an IT competent judicative branch of the government... which, as we all know, is pretty incompetent in these manners.

Building a good and working coding harness with smaller models is really hard. Everything evolves around the limited context size.

Tools must be specification driven to reduce noise and high temp hallucinations, tool call shrinking needs to remove errors and tryouts of different formats of parameters (because LLMs always ignore descriptions in the JSON...), and you have to deal with long running agents because you can't afford them. Planner/orchestrator architecture, agent to agent communication need to be summarized, and then you have the messed up scheduling parts, because you need to prioritize short running agents and give the planner a tool to wait for outputs of spawned contractor agents.

And that's not even talking about sandbox vs playground read/write/access policies of tools.

Harness engineering, if done correctly, is quite hard.

And all of this works 60% of the time, every time.

Anyways, that was somewhat the summary of the last 6 months building my exocomp agentic environment. And it's still not satisfying to work with.

Note that the 3rd wave now also uses a pth file in pypi packages that _search system wide_ for any index.js or .github/setup.js to find its own payload. It literally splits up the payload on purpose to avoid detection.

Mitigation Tool: https://github.com/cookiengineer/antimiasma

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

That's like recommending to use the xterm on Windows. Statistically, nobody uses their computer that way anymore. The world has moved on since the 1990s.

I was only not affected because I use a heavily customized VIM, but even there can I not control how package managers like npm, pip or composer or go are behaving, because they will happily execute the malware payloads on install.

And time wise it's an absurd thing to ask people to manually download all whl files of all their dependencies, extract all those files, and then check whether there was malware in them or not. It's simply not possible to do manually.

This is the wrong analogy.

The equivalent analogy would be using a compiler flag that is triggered for all dependencies and all included libraries without a per-library or per-file changeability. Something like "gcc --force-mut-all-yolo".

Variables have scopes of concern. This new NPM feature has no scope. And that's what my critique is about, because it makes it still unpredictable if any of your dependencies of dependencies needs a script.

The spread vector of potential malware stays identical, because the reason the miasma worm is spreading so fast is because of dependencies of dependencies that are impossible to audit on a case-by-case basis, given the lack of sandboxes and the lack of allowlisting scripts on a per-dep-and-version basis.

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 force every user to just use "--enable-unsecure-feature", guess what will happen?

This is not about improving security. This is about shifting blame.

A much better alternative would've been the introduction of sandboxes or simulation runs that would output which scripts and programs are running due to unpredictable dependencies. This way the user could check before the actual execution, and maintain an allow list much easier. That could be done via an npm update && npm upgrade workflow where the update generates the list that the user has to manually confirm.

Heck, even a chroot would be an improvement, and they're almost pointless these days, considering how good malware got at escaping chroots.

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...

If you build your environment to be specification based, you have to make sure you have good specifications. If your "memory solution" uses freeform markdown notes, you already lost from the start.

Also choose languages with good unit testing built-in, and languages with unified code styles, and unified toolchains. If you use C++, assume that there's a million ways to build your algorithm. If you use JS, assume 10 different build pipelines. If you use java, assume bloat by dependency hell.

LLMs mimic the ecosystem's variety and variadicity(?). Languages like Go shine so well because it's a very opinionated language, where there's only one proposed way on how to implement things. And that's a good harness to begin with. LLMs are like children on the playground. You have to build better rulesets and fences to make them behave how you expect them to.

Also, check out qwen3.6 coder and heretic models. 30b is the sweet spot for coding and unit testing. For planning and designing, gemma4 is pretty good.