When Process Spawning Mimics Malware: Inside a False Alarm Investigation

What initially appeared to be a sophisticated malware attack was revealed through meticulous process analysis to be a runaway subprocess spawning loop from Claude Code. This case highlights how surface-level pattern matching on base64-encoded Python execution can easily trigger false security alarms without proper context. For security professionals and developers, understanding how legitimate Python tooling uses these patterns is critical for distinguishing between actual threats and benign system behavior.