Popular Python Package Becomes Crypto Miner

Ultralytics does vision-related AI stuff, so it's likely the computers infected has GPUs, possibly very powerful ones.

Suorised this sort of thing doesn't happen more often.

15:15 Everything told about CPUs is irrelevant. Ultralytics is a module specifically designed for ML/NN stuff, like LLMs or image generation. So, with a probability of 90%+, the final user has a GPU *and* it's probably a beefy one (maybe even a small GPU cluster) *and* the app this package is used in is intended to utilize this GPU heavily. For example, ComfyUI (one of two most popular web-UIs for StableDiffusion) had to specifically warn their users of this module being compromised.

This is why I never allow Dependabot to auto commit

I feel sorry for all the people who have similar names to Jia Tan. Similar to all the women called Karen who are nice

Since this is targeting ML, a lot of the machines that are going to be using this package will have GPUs, which mine at a much better rate. Additionally if the threat actor has some sort of persistence, there may be a number of machines mining for an extended period of time.

The second hack was their fault. If you have a supply chain attack, you should immediately rotate your keys. That's common knowledge

The whole of internet is held up by toothpicks and tape...

I’ll never feel like I’m wasting time when I do machine learning from scratch again

This feels a lot like boundary sensing, where they worked out an effective proof of concept and then did a dry run with a trivial payload. This gives real world metrics for penetration, adoption, durability and detection. There's also a great response profile now. Theoretical attach vectors are all good and well but nothing compares to real world live fire for knowing where to tighten up or tweak.