Podbit · The a16z Show
While recording this episode at Black Hat 2026, an npm worm was actively spreading across hundreds of repositories. The attack, likely vibe-coded by the threat group that open-sourced their toolkit, exploited an insecure GitHub Action to steal tokens and self-propagate — a scenario the security community had theorized but never seen at scale.
Where this was said
At 12:12 · chapter starts 10:50
The numbers are staggering. Truffle Security, partnering with Hugging Face to clean credentials from hosted training data, found roughly a quarter of a million live keys. Most were concerning. Some were catastrophic. One granted direct push access to a foundational Linux library used by the vast majority of machines on the planet. The implication is not theoretical: anyone who found that key before Truffle Security did could have pushed malware to most of the world's computers in a single operation. While working through this cleanup, Dylan Ayrey was contacted by Hugging Face's CTO about an unrelated OpenAI incident — and when he looked at the incident response, the very first step listed was stolen credentials. Path of least resistance, exactly as theorized. [1] — Dylan Ayrey "Truffle Security found roughly 250,000 live API keys embedded in training datasets on Hugging Face. One of those keys had push access to a …" 17:40
During the Black Hat conference recording, an active npm worm was spreading across a few hundred repositories, with a maintainer whose insecure GitHub Action was likely the entry point.
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