A Python Package Index (PyPI) repository developers reported the introduction of a ban on using @inbox.ru email addresses when registering new projects and attaching additional emails to existing projects. The reason given was a wave of spam during which over 250 accounts were created and more than 1500 misleading projects were established, potentially posing security threats to users.
The created projects were used to reserve names of non-existent libraries that were mistakenly recommended by large language models (slip-squatting) or were similar to popular project names. Before the ban was implemented by PyPI admins, the projects did not contain any code, but it is assumed they could be exploited in the future for attacks on users blindly following chat-bot suggestions or making mistakes in package name writing.
For example, packages were registered with names of command-line utilities to attack projects, where the names of libraries and utilities differ. A previous study showed 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 placeholder project in PyPI with this name, which was downloaded over 30,000 times in three months.
Forrás: opennet.ru
