Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

Claude code is by all accounts a revolutionary tool for getting useful work done on a computer.

It's also:

- a NodeJS app

- installed by curling a shell script and piping it into bash

- an LLM that's given free reign to mess with the filesystem, run commands, etc.

So that's what, like 3 big glaring vectors of attack for your system right there?

I would never feel comfortable running it outside of some kind of sandbox, e.g. VM, container, dedicated dev box, etc.

None of this is the concerning part. The bad part is that it auto-updates while running without intervention - i.e. it is RCE on your machine for Anthropic by design.

So we’re declaring all software with auto-updaters as RCE? That doesn’t seem like a useful distinction.

Software that automatically phoned home to check if an update is available used to be considered spyware if there wasn't a prompt at installation asking if you wanted that. The attitude was "Why should some company get my IP address and a timestamp telling them when/how often I'm online and using their software?" Some people thought that was paranoid.

We gave them an inch out of fear ("You'd better update constantly and immediately in case our shitty software has a bug that's made you vulnerable!") and today they've basically decided they can do whatever the fuck they want on our devices while also openly admitting to tracking our IPs and when/how often we use their software along with exactly what we're using it for, the hardware we're using, and countless other metrics.

Honestly, we weren't paranoid enough.