The developers of the Python Package Index (PyPI) have announced a ban on the use of @inbox.ru email addresses for registering new projects and adding additional emails to existing projects. This decision was made due to a wave of spam, during which over 250 accounts were created and more than 1500 deceptive projects were established, posing potential security threats to users.
The created projects were used to reserve names of non-existent libraries erroneously recommended by large language models (sloqswatting) or similar to the names of popular projects. Before the block was imposed by PyPI administrators, the projects contained no code, but it is assumed that they could be used in the future for attacks on users who blindly follow chatbot recommendations or make mistakes when typing package names.
For example, packages with command-line utility names were registered to attack projects with differing library and utility names. Previous research has shown the effectiveness of this method — ChatGPT recommended a non-existent library 'huggingface-cli' for downloading models from Huggingface and suggested running the command 'pip install huggingface-cli' for its installation. The researcher created a dummy project in PyPI with this name, which was downloaded over 30,000 times within three months.
Source: opennet.ru
