Simon Willison September 18, 2026 2 min signal 2026-09-18

Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans

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17th September 2026 - Link Blog

Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans. Important warning from Adam Harvey and the crates security team:

We believe that there is an ongoing campaign targeting rust-lang members and owners of popular crates that is attempting to compromise devices and accounts in order to use them to publish malware.

A video call is set up for something positive — maybe for a job, maybe for a project, maybe for a contract opportunity — and then that's used as a vector to either get the target to install something on their computer (such as a purportedly missing audio codec) or execute another command (for example, via putting a command on the clipboard).

Last month this trick was used in a successful supply chain attack against the array ref crate, among others.

Any piece of software that depends on open source (which is almost every piece of software) has a network of human beings who are potential attack vectors - everyone with publishing rights to any of the packages in the dependency network for that software.

I guess our best defense right now is dependency cooldowns - giving new package releases a few days before upgrading to them, in the hope that supply chain attacks like this will be spotted by someone else.

Posted 17th September 2026 at 11:59 pm

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