--- title: Rust's supply chain gets hit, and METR loses $600K to a... description: Rust's crates.io had its npm moment: a compromised maintainer account pushed a typosquatted backdoor that stole browser credentials before the Rust Security... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/rust-s-supply-chain-gets-hit-and-metr-loses-600k-to-a-broken-login-jdqeylpxi twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Rust's supply chain gets hit, and METR loses $600K to a broken login | daily.dev og:description: Rust's crates.io had its npm moment: a compromised maintainer account pushed a typosquatted backdoor that stole browser credentials before the Rust Security... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/rust-s-supply-chain-gets-hit-and-metr-loses-600k-to-a-broken-login-jdqeylpxi og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/jDQEYlPXI.png og:image:alt: Rust's supply chain gets hit, and METR loses $600K to a broken login og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Rust's supply chain gets hit, and METR loses $600K to a broken login **[Security Digest](https://daily.dev/sources/security_digest)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Rust's crates.io had its npm moment: a compromised maintainer account pushed a typosquatted backdoor that stole browser credentials before the Rust Security Response Team pulled it in under two hours. METR, an AI safety org, disclosed that attackers rode a broken auth setup on an internal dashboard to drain $600K in free model credits over three weeks without anyone noticing. Flock Safety's license plate reader business is unraveling across multiple US states amid abuse scandals, while CrowdStrike's president laid out just how badly open-weight models have tilted the playing field toward attackers. Also today: two Cursor vulnerabilities exposed secrets and allowed code execution, and Forescout's AI-assisted PLC exploit tests show industrial attacks are getting cheaper to pull off. ## Content **TLDR:** Rust's crates.io had its npm moment: a compromised maintainer account pushed a typosquatted backdoor that stole browser credentials before the Rust Security Response Team pulled it in under two hours. METR, an AI safety org, disclosed that attackers rode a broken auth setup on an internal dashboard to drain $600K in free model credits over three weeks without anyone noticing. Flock Safety's license plate reader business is unraveling across multiple US states amid abuse scandals, while CrowdStrike's president laid out just how badly open-weight models have tilted the playing field toward attackers. Also today: two Cursor vulnerabilities exposed secrets and allowed code execution, and Forescout's AI-assisted PLC exploit tests show industrial attacks are getting cheaper to pull off. --- ## Malicious crates.io package chains into a Chrome/Brave/Edge credential stealer A poisoned version of the `array-ref` crate went live on August 20th, dragging in a typosquatted `proc-macro1` package that ran a backdoor through a build.rs script at compile time. It harvested host info and queried saved logins from Chrome, Brave, and Edge, with infrastructure overlapping prior DPRK-linked npm campaigns. The Rust Security Response Team pulled nine affected crates, downloaded over a million times daily, in roughly 110 minutes, but the underlying problem is structural: compromised maintainer credentials are enough to push malicious code to a centralized registry, and one analysis found 17% of top crates' published code doesn't even match their source repos. build.rs runs arbitrary code at compile time and the ecosystem has treated it as a solved problem mostly because it used to be too small to be a juicy target. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/5rufmEReu) ## METR's $600K API key theft went unnoticed for three weeks An attacker got into METR's internal dashboard through a broken Google auth setup that failed open, likely found via certificate-transparency logs, then convinced the agent behind it to hand over its API key. They burned through roughly $600,000 in model credits over three weeks before anyone caught it. The credits were free from a model provider with no spending cap, so there was no invoice to trigger an alarm, and the attacker's usage just blended into METR's normal high-volume evaluation traffic. Even an org whose entire job is AI safety wasn't watching API key usage closely enough — spend limits and usage alerts aren't optional, free credits or not. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/a1Dhy4v2h) ## Flock Safety's surveillance business is unwinding state by state A Texas city found 400+ outside agencies had access to its Flock cameras when it had authorized 83, running 1.5 million searches against the city's own 6,000. Florida's DOT revoked all state highway permits, Texas froze funding after reporters traced a car-theft surcharge into camera purchases, and a Lufkin officer was indicted on 100 felony counts for unauthorized searches. Secure Justice counted 93 cities cancelling contracts in August alone, four times July's rate, and Flock has quietly been expanding from license plates into tracking people. Meanwhile similar tech is showing up in Canada, in Brampton, Ontario, where residents say they had no idea the cameras were even there, and Canada has no equivalent of the US audit portal that lets the public check police search logs. [Read more](https://daily.dev/feed-by-ids?id=0srbhd2jF&id=VBD6J3CZO) ## CrowdStrike's president on why open-weight models favor attackers Michael Sentonas laid out the asymmetry plainly at Fal.Con: defenders have to get it right 100% of the time while following change control and regulatory rules that attackers simply ignore. He pointed to open-weight models as the real gift to adversaries — nation-states and criminal groups alike can download a model, fine-tune it privately, and the first time defenders see it in action is the first time they have to deal with it. He also cited AI-generated phishing pushing click-through rates above 60%, up from roughly 11-12% a year ago. CrowdStrike's own pitch, SafeMind, claims its purpose-built open models beat frontier models in a live-fire test at 99% lower cost, though CrowdStrike itself calls this a narrow case study rather than a general benchmark. [Read more](https://daily.dev/feed-by-ids?id=u9kOrXSJT&id=g7kewo2gy&id=H9TGWml6A&id=FIk2JpW1T) --- ## Also notable - **Cursor Git action flaw allows arbitrary code execution:** CVE-2026-26268 (CVSS 8.1) let Cursor's AI agent trigger a hidden pre-commit hook via a nested bare repository during routine Git checkout actions, fixed in February 2026, while a separate LayerX-reported issue means any installed Cursor extension can still read OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google API keys from Cursor's unencrypted local SQLite database. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/pg4OeGql4) - **Forescout: AI can port a PLC exploit, but it's not cheap or easy yet:** Porting a known Wago PLC RCE (CVE-2021-31886) to a new device model took Claude models 8.5 hours and $535.74 in tokens with heavy human steering, and one agent permanently bricked a device by writing a bad payload to flash memory. [Read more](https://daily.dev/feed-by-ids?id=jV2HqKDNS&id=vSgmce3wG) - **GPT 5.6-Cyber chains three zero-days in an exploit demo:** Trail of Bits, the firm that audits Signal's Automatic Key Verification, reported watching the model chain three 0-days together, though details on the specific vulnerabilities remain thin. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/aq6HUMN1Y) - **Slim 4.15.3 patches a route parameter constraint bypass:** GHSA-h377-p8x2-prf9 affects Slim 4.0.0 through 4.15.2, and anyone trusting route placeholder values without revalidating them should upgrade now. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/hqIItCNvb) - **Microsoft makes passkeys the Entra ID default, kills SMS/voice auth by 2027:** Passkeys became the default authentication method for Microsoft Entra ID as of September 1, with Microsoft-provided SMS and voice auth set for discontinuation by February 1, 2027, though most enterprises will keep running hybrid password-plus-passkey setups due to legacy app and recovery complexity. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/gLjw3UX4v) --- Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#cyber](https://daily.dev/tags/cyber), [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/rust-s-supply-chain-gets-hit-and-metr-loses-600k-to-a-broken-login-jdqeylpxi) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https://daily.dev/posts/rust-s-supply-chain-gets-hit-and-metr-loses-600k-to-a-broken-login-jdqeylpxi","headline":"Rust's supply chain gets hit, and METR loses $600K to a broken login","text":"Rust's crates.io had its npm moment: a compromised maintainer account pushed a typosquatted backdoor that stole browser credentials before the Rust Security Response Team pulled it in under two hours. 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