PyPI Swiftly Patches Privilege Escalation Flaw in Organizations Feature

On April 14, 2025, the Python Package Index (PyPI) team swiftly addressed a security concern involving persisting team privileges after a user was removed from an organization—a flaw that could have allowed unintended access to sensitive operations. The incident was responsibly disclosed by a user during testing and was remediated in just over 2 hours thanks to PyPI’s proactive infrastructure and security practices.

A user testing the Organizations features on PyPI identified the issue and promptly reported it through the appropriate security channels. The PyPI Security team acknowledged the report within 25 minutes and quickly validated it as a true finding. According to the report, “We validated the report as a true finding, identified all cases where this scenario had occurred, notified impacted parties, and released a fix.”

The PyPI Security team moved swiftly to address the vulnerability. A hotfix was prepared, internally reviewed, and deployed live on PyPI within approximately two hours of the initial report. In addition, impacted parties were notified, and a public pull request was opened with the fix. “In total, this incident was resolved in 2 hours and 2 minutes from the time of report,” the report stated.

Following the deployment of the hotfix, a full audit was conducted to ensure all instances of the vulnerability were accounted for. The audit revealed that the issue was introduced in the initial development of the Organizations features, which were first enabled on April 20, 2023. It also confirmed that only two instances of the issue had occurred and that no unauthorized actions were taken as a result of the persisted privileges.

PyPI Organizations, which have been available since April 20, 2023, are experiencing increased adoption as they exit the public beta period. The incident report highlighted the rapid growth in active Organizations, from 70 Community Organization beta testers to 1,935 active Organizations in the past month. “PyPI Organizations are quickly seeing more use as we (finally) exit our public beta period,” the report noted.

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Ddos

Ddos is a seasoned news reporter, bringing over a decade of expertise to the forefront of cyber security and technology reporting. My work provides timely and insightful analysis of emerging trends and critical developments in these rapidly evolving sectors.

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