security¶

Cybersecurity Friday, Cursor and your .ssh directory

I had this funny idea of doing Cybersecurity Fridays where I take one step to improve my system security and/or reduce the exposure of my personal data.

My first quick win was to ask if I still needed Node.js installed on my Laptop. Homebrew told me that there were zero packages managed by it that depend on it, so it was time for brew remove node. That's it done, I thought and started packing my lunch for a day in the office.

Just a quick check of Hacker News and off I would be on my bike. Turns out today was the day a malicious version of the Claude Code plugin was published on the Cursor marketplace. I spent the morning letting people know and trying to provide meaningful updates in places full of people who don't read Hacker News but should probably know.

PSA: the hackers are already in the house

Been watching an excellent video by Carl Brown on the PHP CVEs and other cybersecurity topics that made the mainstream news today. He points out, amongst other things, that Critical CVEs are not all that rare. PHP has had many over the years and so have other programming languages, libraries, and tools we work with all the time. That these things make the mainstream news, he attributes to the link with the AI hype and paranoia.