Comment by cedws
6 hours ago
GitHub, npm, PyPi, and other package registries should consider exposing a firehose to allow people to do realtime security analysis of events. There are definitely scanners that would have caught this attack immediately, they just need a way to be informed of updates.
PyPI does exactly that, and it's been very effective. Security partners can scan packages and use the invite-only API to report them: https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-03-06-malware-reporting-evo...
PyPI is pretty best-in-class here and I think that they should be seen as the example for others to pursue.
The client side tooling needs work, but that's a major effort in and of itself.
It is not effective if it just takes a simple base64 encode to bypass. If Claude is trivially able to find that it is malicious then Pypi is being negligent.
The package in question was live for 46 minutes. It generally takes longer than that for security partners to scan and flag packages.
PyPI doesn't block package uploads awaiting security scanning - that would be a bad idea for a number of reasons, most notably (in my opinion) that it would be making promises that PyPI couldn't keep and lull people into a false sense of security.
13 replies →
Thanks, TIL.
npm has a feed of package changes you can poll if you're interested.
GitHub has a firehose of events and there's a public BigQuery dataset built from that, with some lag.
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.
It is in a sense dumping responsibility, but there’s a legion of security companies out there scanning for attacks all the time now to prove their products. They’re kind of doing a public service and you’re giving them a chance to catch attacks first. This is why I think dep cooldowns are great.
I feel like they should be legally responsible for providing scanning infrastructure for this sort of thing. The potential economic damage can be catastrophic. I don't think this is the end of the litellm story either, given that 47k+ people were infected.