Discussion
RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117528831681803563
heh, well... I guess, not surprising at all. It's a supply chain attack but also, the amount of lack of knowledge of wtf is happening beneath the surface going on at Anthropic and at plenty of places like it... I wonder if this is just the tip of the iceberg
EDIT: Anthropic claims the vulnerability happened at/with Cursor, not them
@cwebber the entire product anthropic offers is the ability to do things without understanding what is going on beneath the surface with your own product or organization
so
lol
@cwebber also a thing i think about. we've got some information about the *incredible* amount of churn/velocity at anthropic. with the number of line changes they do per day, it would be possible for a major security vulnerability to enter the code, exist for several weeks, then disappear, making it almost impossible to detect because security testing will target top of tree not historical commits
moreover
it would be possible for this to be *engineered*, for example by a nation state attacker
@cwebber when the code changes are being made *literally at random*, insofar as the language model is a statistical model pushed by an RNG. which means if someone induces the code generator to make a *particular* change on *purpose* and doesn't leave forensic traces of their manipulation, there's no way to say it would be a manipulation. it's not like you can go to the human who "co-authored" the commit and ask them why they made a particular change. they aren't the one who makes decisions here
@cwebber Well, Anthropic recently announced they switched from Git to their own version control system because they are merging 30k changes a day.
With this amount of code changes, it's obvious they are not reviewing a fraction of the code they merge. So yeah, I expect things to be much worse
https://www.anthropic.com/research/redesigning-source-control
@cwebber reflections on trusting trust when your reproducible build was made possible using code generated by an org whose development tools are compromised by a supply chain attack
where we actually are now.
@cwebber In my experience all these places are run by people who don't know shit. Don't know how to run a business. Don't know how to implement quality controls or what they should be. And they don't listen to their developers. Call us "losers" if we squeal too much about wanting a little fucking care to happen.
I worked in BCI and there was a req. to encrypt the logs we produce. I worried the enc would be easy to break. They went with xor with a static string. Nothing I said mattered.
@cwebber
Honestly, the coincidences sometimes...
@cwebber@social.coop I have seen no evidence this was uploaded to the VS Code marketplace. Cursor has its own marketplace, and Anthropic do not publish there. It would not surprise me if whichever user was replicating the Claude Code extension across had their account popped
(Yes this ecosystem is a disaster)
@cwebber Suspect so.
Places that "move fast and break things" tend to break things.
Have worked at places like this, and security or bug fixes are often second to new features.
And that's all at places that don't have massive targets on their backs like those frontier labs.
Fun when the threat model can include state actors, in addition to the typical threats.
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@cwebber Plenty of sensible people saw this coming a mile away but vibe coders just stuck their fingers in their ears. Unfortunately it affects those of us who have been shouting too. I hate it here.