Python is a programming language whose libraries, runtimes, and dependencies can introduce vulnerabilities into software and security tooling.
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Background for this topic.
Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language used for applications, automation, data processing, and security tooling. Its reference implementation, CPython, includes a standard library, while third-party packages extend the language for web services, networking, and system administration. Python’s broad deployment means vulnerabilities can affect both the interpreter and widely used libraries.
Security concerns include flaws in Python or dependencies, malicious or compromised packages introduced through typosquatting or dependency confusion, and unsafe application behavior. For example, deserializing untrusted data with pickle, evaluating untrusted expressions with eval, or constructing shell commands from unchecked input can enable code execution. Practitioners should inventory transitive dependencies, pin and review versions, use trusted package sources and integrity checks, apply security updates, and run services with least privilege. Python is also commonly used to automate scanning, analysis, and response, so those scripts require the same access control, code review, and secret-handling discipline as other production software.
A dormant package available on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository was updated nearly after two years to propagate an information stealer malware called Nova Sentinel
Microsoft has released an open access automation framework called PyRIT (short for Python Risk Identification Tool) to proactively identify risks in generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious packages on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that were found leveraging a technique called DLL side-loading to circumvent detection by security software and run malicious code