My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack

A technical analysis reveals that the suspected malware attack was actually a runaway process loop caused by Claude Code, not a malicious intrusion.

Now I have the full picture. Here's my analysis:

What 2.1.81 is: Claude Code v2.1.81. You had

5 Claude Code instancesrunning at shutdown time.

Shutdown timeline:

01:36:33â Force shutdown initiated01:36:36â Shutdown stall captured (162 processes still running, 21 of them Python)01:37:11â System booted

Process tree at shutdown:

Normal Claude Code MCP servers (2 instances):

Claude Code [82193] â python3.13 [88842] â node [88854] (416MB)
Claude Code [35621] â python3.13 [45088] â node [45091] (228MB)

These are MCP server bridges â Python wraps a Node.js MCP server. Normal behavior.

A uv run

chain:

zsh â uv [74172] (deadlocked) â python3.13 [74174] (running a .py file)
â python3.13 [74180] (python -c "...", reading pipe)
â python3.13 [86263] (running .py file, sleeping + os.stat)
â python3.13 [86264] (python -c "...", reading pipe)

14 orphaned python -c processes (two batches of 7):

PIDs 89759-89765 (~38 hours old)
PIDs 67956-67962 (different age)
All running _PyRun_SimpleStringFlagsWithName

â this ispython -c "exec(base64.b64decode(...))"

All orphaned (parent died, reparented to launchd)
All stuck reading from a dead pipe

What likely happened:

The exec(base64.b64decode('...'))

pattern is not malware â it's how Python tooling (including Claude Code's Bash tool) passes code snippets to python -c

while avoiding shell escaping issues. The base64 encoding is just a safe transport mechanism.

The 11k process storm was likely a runaway spawning loop from one of these sources:

A Claude Code tool/agent interaction that got stuck in a loop spawning python -c

processes - A uv run

script (the 74174 chain) that had a subprocess spawning bug

Good news:

No persistence mechanisms foundâ no suspicious crontabs, launch agents, or launchd jobsNo suspicious Python processes running nowâ clean after rebootAll processes used your local uv Pythonâ nothing from unknown pathsNo malicious indicatorsâ all parents trace back to Claude Code, uv, or zsh

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