AI Coding/Security/Slop Squatting

• Slop Squatting

  • Brian McCullough - Techmeme Ride Home - 2025-04-14 Mon – Tariff Groundhog Day
    • Quote 1

      • “Slop squatting doesn’t rely on misspellings. Instead, threat actors create malicious packages with AI-generated names that seem plausible,” [20:15] he elaborates, referencing a study published by The Register.
        

    • Quote 2
      • Devs, let me warn you about something new to worry about. If you're using AI to write your code, say hello to slop squatting, quoting the register. As we noted in March and September last year, security and academic researchers have found that AI code assistants invent package names. In a recent study, researchers found that about 5.2% of package suggestions from commercial models didn't exist compared to 21.7% from open source or openly available models. Running that code should result in an error when importing a non-existent package, but miscreants have realized they can hijack the hallucination for their own benefit. All that's required is to create a malicious software package under a hallucinated package name and then upload the bad package to a package registry or index like PyPy or NPM for distribution. Thereafter, when an AI code assistant re-hallucinates the...
  • Slopsquatting: When AI Agents Hallucinate Malicious Packages | Trend Micro (US)
    • Slopsquatting is a modern supply-chain threat in AI-powered workflows, where coding agents can hallucinate non-existent but plausible package names that malicious actors can use to deliver malware.
    • Slopsquatting is an evolution of the classic typosquatting attack. Rather than relying on human typographical errors however, attackers exploit AI-generated hallucinations instead. When a coding agent hallucinates a dependency—such as starlette-reverse-proxy—an attacker can publish a malicious package under that exact name. Developers who unwittingly run the generated installation commands may inadvertently download and execute malware.