birdcage

One of the sources referenced in the paper is about the work the company I co-founded is doing (https://phylum.io). We've been working closely with PyPI to not only report issues related to malware, but are also helping provide guidance around on-going work to help curb additional malware in the ecosystem. I think this is a step in the right direction, and one I hope other ecosystems will eventually take. Though, this is likely to be a cat and mouse game for the foreseeable future. Detection will get better, and attackers will change tactics. In the meantime, we've been open-sourcing some tooling to help protect developers from these sorts of attacks. Namely, a sandbox that locks down network/disk/env [1] and our CLI [2] that allows you to perform a `pip` install in the sandbox, after checking our API for behaviors/issues with the package

Happy to see this on HN! I'm one of the co-founders @ Phylum. We actively monitor and report on malware and software supply chain attacks across multiple ecosystems. Most notably, we were the first to identify and report on attacks carried out by North Korean state actors in NPM [1], prevented an early typosquat campaign against Rust developers on crates.io [2] and recently a faux email validation utility with a fairly complicated attack chain [3]. We've been monitoring npm the longest, and while I wouldn't classify this particular attack as complex or sophisticated, it's interesting in that it continues the trend of targeting build systems (and more generally, developers). Our goal is to help clean up as many of these registries as possible, and to provide developers with the tooling to better protect themselves from attack. In doing so,