1. An inexperienced vibecoder might create an app where all user passwords are stored in plain text. 2. An inexperienced user might use the same password across all services and not use two-factor authentication. 3. An inexperienced hacker uses AI to find a vulnerability in the app and gains access to the database. 4. The password from the database gives the hacker access to all the services where the user is registered.
This problem has always existed.
But now, almost any inexperienced person can create an app, and an inexperienced hacker can find a vulnerability in that app.
At the same time, the number of inexperienced users hasn’t changed. It’s just that they’ve now started using vibe-coded products and are exposing themselves to greater risk than before.
Right now, there are thousands of repositories on GitHub distributing malware. Any of you can find these repositories, and you don’t need any special knowledge to do so. All you have to do is use the standard search function on the GitHub website.
These repositories have been around for two years. GitHub has billions of dollars, a security team, and artificial intelligence. Why haven’t they solved this problem in two years?
First, we’ll look at the repositories we’ve already found, identify common patterns within them, and then use those patterns to find other repositories.
Take a look at these repositories; in each one, the readme contains a link to a zip archive containing a Trojan:
Link to download the zip archive containing the Trojan
If we download this zip archive and submit individual files from it to VirusTotal, we’ll see the following results:
Scanning files from the zip archive on VirusTotal
Even a quick glance at these repositories shows that they have the same structure, nearly identical headings, and every heading contains an emoji. That’s all the information we need to find other repositories.
Let’s use the heading "📥 Download" and search for that string on GitHub. But we don’t want to search the entire codebase — just the readme files. Go to github.com and enter the following in the search bar at the top:
path:readme.md "## 📥 Download"
The number of results will always vary. At first, it showed me 9k repositories, but when I went to page 2, there were only 109 repositories. After refreshing the page, it was back to 9k repositories.
In the search output, you’ll need to visually filter out the results that contain any other text besides just the heading. The heading variations will look something like this:
## 📥 Download Now
## 📥 Download Now Again
## 📥 Download the Software
## 📥 Download & Install
Results of the first search
Open these repositories. They will have a link to a zip archive containing a Trojan.
However, the search results will include many legitimate repositories. We can improve the search by adding a search for zip archives. The search string will look like this:
path:readme.md "## 📥 Download" ".zip"
This will significantly improve the results. Now, right in the search results, we can see which repositories contain the heading we need and a link to a zip archive.
Results of the second search
But these results still include legitimate repositories. How else can we refine the search query?
All links to zip archives lead to githubusercontent.com or github.com. Also, the zip archive contains a version number, for example, "Software-3.6.zip". So we just need to write a regular expression to search for such links. But as I said at the beginning, you don’t need any specialized knowledge for this. Any free AI model can handle it. We feed it 10 such links, and after a few iterations, we get this result:
Enter this query, and you’ll get the repositories that are distributing the zip archive containing the Trojan. The number of repositories varies. In my case, sometimes there are 111, sometimes 4.4k.
Results of the third search
But this entire search only worked because we had an initial list of repositories from which we were able to derive a general search pattern.
Maybe GitHub’s security team didn’t have these repositories? Maybe they don’t know about this general pattern?
A month ago, I published an article in which I analyzed this scheme in detail. I wrote a script that found 10,000 such repositories. I published the list of all the repositories and the script on GitHub.
The article made it to the Hacker News front page. Other cybersecurity websites wrote about this scheme.
Here is the full list of actions GitHub took:
They deleted all 10k repositories that the script found.
That’s it. They didn’t do anything else.
What’s more, a few hours later I ran the script again; it found new repositories, and I added them to the article. They weren’t blocked for an entire month. Even though all they had to do was open my article again, grab the new links, and block those repositories. That turned out to be too difficult for them.
But there’s one conclusion we can draw: they’re well aware of this malware distribution scheme.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t find an answer to why this is happening. Microsoft is a corporation with billions in revenue. They have thousands of employees, limitless resources, and artificial intelligence. All they needed to do was allocate a few days for any regular employee so they could use Copilot to find all these repositories and block them.
I’ve never worked at a large company. And I can’t imagine how decisions are made specifically at GitHub, or what bureaucratic nightmare managers have to go through to start combating malicious repositories.
But they deleted all 10k repositories just a few hours after the first article was published.
Imagine you’re working on an hourly basis. How would you answer these questions?
An idea popped into your head that could improve the company’s financial situation. It came out of nowhere — you weren’t even thinking about it; you were just going about your daily routine. The company doesn’t buy individual ideas; it only pays by the hour. How many hours should the company pay you if you spent 0 hours on this idea?
You’ve been assigned the task of implementing a certain feature. You remember that you’ve already built this feature before and spent 50 hours on it. You reuse that solution in the current project in 10 minutes. Everything works. The task is complete. Should the company pay for 50 hours or for 10 minutes?
With the advent of AI agents, things have gotten even more interesting. You know how to use them effectively and delegate a task to them that would have taken you 10 hours to complete yourself. The agent draws up a plan, you review it, the agent carries it out, and you review it. After a few such iterations, the task is completed in 30 minutes. Should the company pay for 10 hours or for 30 minutes?
You spent 10 hours working on a solution, only to realize that you’d been doing everything wrong all along, and it seems you could have figured this out right from the start and chosen a completely different solution. Should the company pay for that time?
There are two options for the contractor here:
Don’t work with companies that pay by the hour.
Artificially inflate the number of hours in your report.
If you choose the first option, you’ll lose half of your potential clients. If you want to keep your clients and get paid what you want, you’ll have to choose the second option.
If you use a ready-made solution and complete a task in 30 minutes, write in your report that you spent 50 hours on it. This way, when working remotely, you can juggle 2-4 full-time jobs at the same time. You work 30 hours, report 150 hours, and get paid for 150 hours.
Why am I even talking about reports? Managers at companies that pay by the hour want to see a report detailing where those hours were spent. If you simply say that a task took 50 hours without providing any details, you’ll most likely get questions. But if you come up with a plausible explanation of how you spent your time, an effective manager will open the spreadsheet, see the neatly organized information broken down by the hour, and be satisfied with it.
You can argue all you want that this isn’t fair. But if we look at the real world, it turns out that, in most cases, money is a way to live comfortably. The more you earn, the better you live. Of course, you can choose the honest path and hope that your honesty will be properly recognized and that you’ll get some bonus for it down the line. Are you willing to sacrifice your current income for the sake of a hypothetical future?
To prevent this, companies sometimes use apps that automatically take a screenshot of the screen every 15 minutes and ask workers to fill out a report after every hour worked. This weeds out experienced and confident workers. Only those who clearly have trouble finding work — and are willing to accept almost any conditions — remain. What quality of work will the company get if it chooses this approach?
There’s another way to avoid logging three times as many hours. Just set your hourly rate three times higher. But if you want $300 an hour and someone else wants $100, a company hiring based on price will choose the other person, not you. Even if the company ends up paying that other person the same amount, because he’ll report three times as many hours as he actually worked. In that case, your honesty and higher hourly rate will leave you without a job.
Of course, this doesn’t work with ideas. There’s a belief that ideas are worthless, and that only their implementation has value. So if you come up with a brilliant idea to solve a problem, the company won’t pay you for it. Managers believe that this idea is already included in your billable hours. If your hourly rate is $60 and you spent one minute on the idea, then so be it — you’ll get a whopping $1 for the idea. And you can’t write in a report that you spent dozens of hours coming up with that idea. After all, you didn’t conduct any research. This is often why employees don’t share ideas with management at all — ideas that could actually help the company grow.
If there are so many problems with hourly billing, why not simply agree to pay per project or per task? This solves some problems but creates new ones:
The client must specify the tasks in detail before work begins. What if, after work has started, the client wants to change the requirements or add something? The client will have to renegotiate the terms with the contractor.
The contractor needs to accurately estimate the timeline and price. However, they don’t yet know what challenges will arise during the project. If their estimates are off and the work takes three times as long, what should they do? Try to negotiate new terms or complete the work under the current terms?
Sometimes, estimating a project can take many hours. The client may not agree to these terms, in which case the contractor ends up wasting their time on the estimate.
Different contractors can provide very different estimates for the same project. This depends on the contractor’s experience, the quality of their work, their current workload, and a dozen other factors. How can a client choose the best contractor for a project?
With rare exceptions, I never work on a per-task or per-project basis — neither as a freelancer nor as a client. But I also don’t work on an hourly basis.
I’ve chosen an approach where I’m paid weekly or monthly, with very brief reports or none at all. This works very well for startups with small teams.
When I’m looking for an employee, I discuss their target weekly pay with them. Every few weeks, I assess the value they’ve delivered. I look not only at the tasks they’ve completed, but also at the ideas they’ve proposed, the help they’ve given to other employees, or any other value they’ve added. I don’t care at all how many hours they worked. And I don’t care about their timesheet, because I always know what my employees have been working on.
This approach solves all the problems associated with hourly and project-based billing. But if you’re a contractor, you’ll lose a lot of clients with this approach. The client will ask: what exactly am I paying for? After all, they don’t know what tasks you’ll complete during that period or exactly how many hours you’ll spend on the work. In most cases, they need to see a pretty, detailed report. If you work at a company like this, you have zero leverage over the process. Management works the way it’s always worked and considers its management style to be the right one.
Consider another scenario. A company has agreed with a contractor to pay on a weekly basis, regardless of hours worked. The contractor has been working for several months, has performed well, and the client is very satisfied with their work. But they didn’t work last week. Should the company pay them for that week?
I follow a crypto blogger, but I see that almost all of his posts are about how successful he is. He flies business class, buys his wife gifts, and dines at expensive restaurants. But if I wanted to look at your photos, I’d follow you on Instagram, wouldn’t I?
Your profile bio says you’ll teach me how to trade crypto. I followed you to learn something new, but after scrolling through a month’s worth of your posts, I only saw one piece of advice from an AI. How exactly is looking at all your photos going to help me? How will that convince me to buy something from you? Why should I trust you?
Photos of your success don’t explain where that success came from. People could have signed up through your referral links, lost money following your advice, and you would have earned a commission on their losses.
Right, you’ve caught the attention of people who want the same kind of successful life. But how will you get the attention of millionaires? They live much more successful lives than you do. You won’t attract them with a picture-perfect life.
At first, you get used to a single number, confidently give your answer, and then realize you’ve already gotten it wrong by a year. The years fly by so quickly that it’s sometimes hard to remember. You have to calculate the difference between the current year and the year you were born.
That’s why I’ve chosen a different way to answer. I pick a single number and stick with it for the next five years. Or until I’m mentally okay with that number. For example, if I’m between 22 and 28, I say 25.
People probably don’t care about your actual date of birth. If you want to feel younger, say 30, even if you’re 35. Want to seem more mature? Say 25, even if you’re 20.
As you get older, you’ll hear this question much less often than when you were younger. When you’re 17 and someone else is 20, you think they’re smarter and more experienced than you. A difference of a few years seems significant. But when you’re 40 and interacting with someone around the same age, it doesn’t matter to you whether they’re 35 or 45.
And when you have kids, people will often ask you how old your child is. And that’s when you’ll get even more mixed up with the answer.
