Python Bytes
Python Bytes
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Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science space.

#309 When Malware PoC's are Themselves Malware

November 09, 2022 00:35:01 30.09 MB Downloads: 0

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About the show

Sponsored by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub.

Michael: #0: Python Bytes is 6 years old this week. Thank you! 🎉

Michael #1: Malicious proof-of-concepts are exposing GitHub users to malware and more

  • The paper
  • They found that of the 47,313 GitHub repositories they had downloaded and checked, 4,893 (10.3%) were malicious.
  • In some the attackers were trying to plant malware on users’ machines, while in others, they tried to open backdoors using CobaltStrike, for example
  • Ignoring this problem can cause damage that ranges from infecting yourself as [a] user, to infecting your company and likely your customers as well if it’s a more sophisticated attack,” El Yadmani warned.
  • Languages
    • Ruby 379
    • Go 400
    • JavaScript 548
    • Shell 652
    • C++ 962
    • Java 1071
    • C 1686
    • Python 8305
    • Undetected 31858
  • Example Python exfile script included in the paper

Brian #2: The great Mastodon experiment

Michael #3: Gitpod and the traveling dev

  • Gitpod is an open-source Kubernetes application for ready-to-code developer environments that spins up fresh, automated dev environments for each task, in the cloud, in seconds.
  • Gitpod is paid, but there are decent free tiers
  • Features
  • Run a desktop or browser based version of VS Code or any JetBrains IDE and customise it to your individual needs - from themes to extensions, you have full control.

Brian #4: Color in the terminal

  • pytest-check currently doesn’t use color
    • but a little red for failures would be good (and was requested via an issue)
  • I could use rich, but maybe that’s a slightly larger hammer than I need for this job
  • Maybe raw escape sequences like print('\033[31m' + 'some red text')
    • kinda gross
    • won’t work out of the box on Windows.
  • But colorama can fix Windows.
    • It just recently added just_fix_windows_console(), which apparently works better than init() in that it can be called multiple times without blowing up.
    • Includes easier to read codes for some basic colors, so this works: 
      from colorama import just_fix_windows_console
    from colorama import Fore, Style
    just_fix_windows_console()

    print(Fore.RED + 'some red text')
    print(Style.RESET_ALL)
    print('back to normal now')

Extras

Brian:

  • Simon Willison wrote What to blog about, which includes
    • TIL (today I learned) posts that don’t need to be full tutorials
    • Projects you’ve built
  • I’d like to include
    • Projects in progress
    • Bug fixes or feature additions where you needed to learn a bit of something beforehand
      • Example: I should write up “Adding red to pytest-check”

Michael:

Joke: