Bumblebee Tutorial: Scan Your Dev Machine for Supply Chain Risks

Every time a supply chain attack hits, security teams ask: which dev machines have the compromised package installed? SBOMs cover production builds. EDR covers running processes. Neither checks the actual files sitting on a developer's laptop.

Perplexity open-sourced Bumblebee (May 22, 2026) to fill that gap: a small, read-only Go binary that inventories npm, pnpm, Yarn, Bun, PyPI, Go modules, RubyGems, Composer packages, plus MCP configs and editor/browser extensions. No install scripts, no network calls during scanning, no write operations.

DepScan checks a single package.json in the browser; Bumblebee checks your entire machine across 8 ecosystems. The same supply chain principles apply locally, not just in CI.

All scans are read-only. Bumblebee never executes a package manager or runs install scripts, which sidesteps attacks that hide in preinstall/postinstall hooks.

When a new supply chain compromise drops, the first question is: are we affected? Bumblebee's exposure catalog feature turns that into a 5-second answer instead of a manual grep across every developer machine.

Create a JSON file describing the compromised packages:

Then run a targeted deep scan against it:

The --findings-only flag means you only see records that match the catalog. No match, no output. This turns "is anyone running the compromised version?" into a trivially scriptable check you can run across your fleet.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) configs define which external servers your AI coding tools connect to. After the ContextCrush incident in March 2026, this became a real attack surface: a malicious MCP server can exfiltrate code context, inject prompts, or pivot into your development environment.

Bumblebee checks these config files: mcp.json, .mcp.json, claude_desktop_config.json, mcp_config.json, mcp_settings.json, cline_mcp_settings.json, Gemini CLI/Code Assist settings, and ~/.claude.json.

This outputs every MCP server config found on the machine, with the server URL and transport type for each entry. You can then cross-reference against known compromised servers or your organization's allowlist.

For a quick browser-based check of a single config file without installing anything, use the MCPConfigCheck tool.

A one-off scan is useful during an incident. A daily scan turns Bumblebee into continuous inventory. Here's a crontab entry that runs at 2 AM every day:

On macOS, launchd is more reliable than cron for scheduled tasks. Here's a plist that achieves the same thing:

For security teams managing a fleet, forward these NDJSON files to a central log aggregator (Splunk, Elastic, or even a simple S3 bucket). When an advisory drops, you query your existing inventory instead of scanning every machine in real time.

Bumblebee fills the specific gap between SBOMs and EDR. It tells you what's on disk right now, not what ran or what shipped. Pair it with a VS Code extension audit for a more complete picture of your local attack surface.