Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines A- driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed.
The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday by security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock. CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AlI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations.
The credentials were extracted during a 40-minute window in March while the victims used compromised versions of LiteLLM downloaded from the package’s official location in the Python Package Index repository. Hudson Rock said it made the discovery after analyzing a 195TB file that it obtained. Neither firm identified the source of the information.
It’s late and I’m tired so my math could be wrong but if they downloaded 195 TB in 40 minutes then the attacker is working with an internet connection that is at least 81.25 Gigabytes (not bits) per second. That isn’t a script kiddie. That’s serious business.
From what I am understanding, it was a 40 minute window when the malicious model was available to download in the repositories. After it was downloaded, they had all the time until it was detected in the organization to exfiltrate the data, which was potentially weeks or months.
Download doesn’t necessarily mean that they dumped everything on their local PC - they could just upload everything from all those servers to an S3 bucket or whatever.
That way the bottleneck would be either the ingress of the hyperscalers or the egress of the attacked company (which probably uses the hyperscalers anyway). I probably could also do that this way with my humble home Internet connection on a semi reliable WiFi…