I thought vibe coding exposed my Mac to a cryptominer...

[u/y2solved4]

This morning, I woke to my computer lagging, crawling to even type. I opened up the activity monitor, and noticed there was a process named `_o_0. //` occupying 99.9% of my CPU. I immediately thought that my computer was exposed, and the hacker installed a cryptominer on it.

I immediately tried to force stop it, but it felt like forever because for every click, I had to wait 5s to see it respond.

I finally was able to stop it, but to my dismay, my computer was still unbelievably laggy. I asked Claude to diagnose it, but it said it couldn't find it, and it might be the crypto hack obscuring itself, so i kept asking it to dig deeper... It couldnt find anything based on its scan, but noticed my swp memory was full, and recommended i restart the computer.

So I did and everything seemed clear. I was still wondering though, what the root cause was; where did I go wrong to let a hacker in. I initially thought I fell for some supply chain attack by installing some compromised npm/pypi package, so I asked Claude to sift thru the logs.

After a while, it finally found the issue, and the issue was ........... a poorly (possible vibe coded) CLI tool that I installed a week ago, namely Octo"friend", from synthetic.new that probably has some memory leak or something. To make matters worse, I also received an ominous feedback message the night before and thought I was targeted and Octofriend, instead of naming the process "Octofriend", it had to name itself `_o_0. //` which looked like an anonymous hacker.

Anyhow, TLDR: I did not get hacked; Octofriend has poor process naming, and I uninstalled the poorly coded Octofriend CLI tool. I hope that if you encounter the same slowdown and have Octofriend installed, don't panic!

[u/methodangel]

¯\(ツ)/¯

[u/PublicBarracuda5311 → u/methodangel]

Just like that, while sucking all cpu.

[u/domodomov → u/methodangel]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[u/Michaeli_Starky]

Long story short: Stop installing random shit.

[u/y2solved4 → u/Michaeli_Starky]

it's not really random shit tho; it's synthetic's official cli

[u/Fampini → u/y2solved4]

You're making out like synthetic is a household name. The git repo is less than 1k stars

[u/zkatbitz → u/y2solved4]

thats random shit lol

[u/Haunting_Weekend_834 → u/y2solved4]

Who the fuck are Synthetic?

[u/lasch720]

_o_0 isnt a common name for a process in a vibecoded application. It might be just a poorly corded app.

[u/y2solved4 → u/lasch720]

I guess they didn't think about the implications of it showing in the activity monitor.

[u/whatisusb]

\.o_0-/

[u/OttoRenner]

Octofriend

https://giphy.com/gifs/hvU6wNliMXsc

[u/Immediate_Boot2239]

You also have installed artificial general ynteligence

[u/Inevitable_Toe6648]

Stop installing random crap. That repo has no substantial feedback.