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Pete Morgan

Co-founder - Phylum

Pete Morgan is a highly experienced professional in the field of cybersecurity, reverse engineering, exploit development, hardware security, malware analysis, supply chain security, and DevSecOps. As the President and Co-founder of Phylum, he leads a team dedicated to enhancing cybersecurity measures and practices.

Pete Morgan's educational background includes studies at Slinger High School and obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science as well as studying German Language at the University of Wisconsin - Fox Valley. His academic foundation contributes to his proficiency in various technical areas.

In addition to his role at Phylum, Pete Morgan is also known for founding and serving as the Principal at Clever Security, showcasing his entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to the cybersecurity industry.

Highlights

May 22 · linkedin

The news of PyPI suspending new user and new project registrations flew around the open-source community over the weekend. I wholeheartedly commend PyPI for taking action. Suspending new users/projects should not have caused any significant issues to existing users, but can very easily thwart attackers from mass pollution of the open-source supply chain when attacks like this strike. We have to remember that open-source projects like PyPI are most frequently operated by volunteers and open-source enthusiasts. Phylum works with PyPI regularly and we've always been impressed by and grateful for their team’s attentiveness and dedication. 

In Phylum's Q1'23 Research Report (1st link in comment below) we identified approximately 324K new packages published to PyPI during Q1. While that’s an impressive statistic, it pales in comparison to NPM's 2.5M over the same timeline. On balance, the amount of malicious packages and software supply chain attacks Phylum identified in NPM also dwarfed the amount identified in PyPI. These attacks are happening everywhere.

One of many challenges in defending a package registry like NPM or PyPI is resource exhaustion. Our research team documented how attackers are monitoring when malicious packages are removed and triggering a new upload of the same code with modified package names (2nd link in comment below). This is merely a bit of automation on the attacker's part, but it can very quickly become problematic for package registries trying to defend their users.    I wish I could reasonably say this issue is going to improve in the near future, but as more attackers shift focus into the open-source software supply chain, the problem will only become more complex.

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Pete Morgan
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Location

Scottsdale, Arizona, United States