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- Hacker News
- Can we link to the actual google article, instead of these editorialized articles about the article?
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/ai-...
by atrocities - Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/ai-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096712)
Why collect all the news dupes but not the source up top OP? Because the source was already submitted?
- This will only keep happening, I know some people are skeptical as to what level of function the AI was used, whether it was to write code, or to do the hack, it really doesn't matter, the fact that anyone can use AI to do this, hell people nuke their prod systems with AI, should have every company worth its salt investing in security audits, code scanning and anything they can to find exploits before some 14 year old somehow breaks into your system with AI and wreaks chaos over your infrastructure.
Are you one bad headline away from a major hack? Or worse, one hack away from your company going under? It's all a ticking time bomb.
Someone else on HN pointed out that distros like Debian might be too slow as people find live exploits in the kernel, it might not be worth keeping something like that, on the other hand Ubuntu supports live kernel upgrading at the enterprise level, so maybe Ubuntu Server might be Debian's indirect saving grace.
Article says that it was largely a theory until now. That's not entirely true, we know that hackers used Claude to hack the Mexican government, got the PII of every citizen basically. I would not be surprised if there's more hacks that are undetected. The hackers don't need to declare their use of AI, its irrelevant.
- Meanwhile, I cannot ask ChatGTP how to pick my own lock. Even though this information is available in a book in the library.by bouncycastle
- ...or on YouTube.by userbinator
- Also available to Fed Gov entities, surely.
For me, not thee
by esseph - Then go ask some ChineseGPT about this, I guess, as these models seem to be much less restricted on such topics (you could even get some explosives recipes, though not all of them are real and safe) /jby dryarzeg
- Black hat hacking seems to be a well-fit use case for these LLMs. Attackers only need to be right once, so the sometimes-wrongness of the attacks might be trivial. This probably devalues stashes of zero-day exploits for those that have been witholding them.by gman2093
- This stance doesn't make sense. They have the same access that the rest of the public does; and, any Red Team member is going to be doing the exact same thing.by t-writescode
- I wonder if that means we're going to see an increase in the attempted 'leveraging' of hoarded zero days lest they get publicised and patched prior to being profitable.by BLKNSLVR
- I do not personally hoard these exploits. My personal experience has been that responsible disclosure already has little to no economic incentive. I have gone through the pain of rigorously documenting and disclosing zero-day exploits through the official channel, and the vendor categorized it as Won't Fix, Intended Behavior. I feel that AI discovery devalues these disclosures even more because these bugs can now be discovered independently before anyone can act on them.by fwbruno
- Do they have high confidence the actor used a keyboard? Used the bathroom at some point during the attack? Has a mother?
Idk, this doesn’t strike me as news. Google just missed a vulnerability.
by rudolph9 - Yeah anyone doing any sort of development is using AI, including for exploits. Means nothing.by vasco
- >But new A.I. models like Anthropic’s Mythos, which was announced last month, appear to be so good at finding such holes that Anthropic shared it only with a limited number of firms and government agencies in the United States and Britain.
Immediate distrust of the article. GPT 5.5 is out with nearly the same capability. The author might be parroting company marketing, unable to discern that a lot of this is much less complex than it seems. For all we know this group could have had a model examine some obscure line of code thousands of times until it found something.
by s3p - Immediate distrust of the article… The author might be parroting company marketing, unable to discern that a lot of this is much less complex than it seems.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/dustin-volz
> I am based in The Times’s Washington bureau, and much of my focus is on the dealings of U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as their counterparts abroad, chiefly in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
> My remit spans nation-state hacking conflict, digital espionage, online influence operations, election meddling, government surveillance, malicious use of A.I. tools and other related topics.
> Before joining The Times, I worked at The Wall Street Journal, where I spent eight years covering cyber conflict and intelligence. My recent work at The Journal included a series of articles revealing a major Chinese intrusion of America’s telecommunications networks that breached the F.B.I.’s wiretap systems and has been described as one of the worst U.S. counterintelligence failures in history. I have also worked at Reuters and National Journal, where I began my career in Washington chronicling congressional efforts to reform surveillance practices at the N.S.A. in the wake of the 2013 Edward Snowden disclosures.
> My work has been internationally recognized, including by the White House Correspondents’ Association, the Gerald Loeb Awards, the Society of Publishers in Asia and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
What have you done lately?
by reaperducer - That is very clearly the claim of mythos though. The experience of projects that do have access to mythos though suggests that if you use the other models it's not going to find much of anything. Which is to say generally we believe it is marketing as you say however the claim that the reporter said is very clearly stated even if it's not right.by bluGill
- GPT 5.5 does not have the same capabilities as Mythos. There is a separate 5.5-Cyber model which is the Mythos “equivalent”, but it is similarly restricted access like Mythos. Per OpenAI, the major difference is the built-in safeguards that 5.5 (and other models have), where 5.5-Cyber does not have these safeguards and is more “permissive” for security work.
See https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-5-with-trusted-access-for-cyb...
- Okay, when fuzzing techniques came out there was a big surge in discovered and exploited bugs. AI is more general and I expect there be a similar surge. However fuzzing is cheap but compute and techniques can be "owned." The economics of AI is unless you pay for it, it is difficult to self host (expensive hardware, open source models are catching up).
State actors + hackers will have more resources to make better offense. What worse, in my experience AI produced code is blind to overall system behavior. So I fear the exploits will be either low hanging/trivial to exploit errors or bigger system level bugs.
- I wonder what is the goal here? If Google Search was used to find a major software flaw would this be reported in this way? Between Mythos, OpenAI's Mythos equivalent, it's not clear if there is some interest to keep the "AI is powerful" trend going or they are trying to indirectly bring attention to the technical capabilities of LLMs in cybersecurity (as a potentially untapped source of revenue).
- They're proclaiming that AI is the Latest Big Thing in the perpetual computer security arms race. So unless you want to be stuck fighting in propeller-driven planes when every real air force has jets, you better start spending big on AI. Preferably Google's AI, of course.by bell-cot
- It's the narrative "For your own security in the internet (and children's safety), show us your ID now, please".
Tired of this trend.
by zx8080 - Haven't read the article, but let me guess:
"That's why for your safety we need a scan of your ID and your biometrics to let you use our best models"
by koiueo - How do they handle twins?by whynotmaybe
- My Android phone takes a photo of my face every time I unlock the device. I don't have access to those images, but someone already has photos of my eyeballs!
I'm not sure why or how to turn it off, does anyone know?
(Also, insert weary photo of Kaczynski here.)
by andai - > “We have high confidence that the actor likely leveraged an A.I. model to support the discovery and weaponization of this vulnerability,” the report said.
I wonder what gives them that "high confidence", as opposed to this being just a traditional zero-day?
I'm not being snarky or critical, I'm genuinely wondering what about an attack could possibly indicate it was discovered with LLM assistance?
Like, unless the attackers' computers have been seized and they've been able to recover the actual LLM transcript history? But nothing in the article indicates that the hackers have been caught, just that a patch was developed.
by crazygringo - Humans can sometimes find a needle in a haystack, but its impossible for us to find multiple needles in multiple haystacks and chain them together into an attack. AIs can work through a complex search space much more efficiently, that's the tell.
- The article says it included excessive explainer text. And I'm almost positive an earlier version of the article referenced hallucinated library references though I don't see it in the present version of the article.by glenstein
- Maybe after they realized how they were vulnerable they asked an LLM to find the exploit through a similar means to try and replicate it. Still doesn't prove it but maybe gives them confidence this weird thing can only really be found that way etc.
- We are going to be seeing a lot of these moving forward. It's the easy way out. If you've worked with Google, you will know that it's an environment where accountability doesn't thrive. You will find people who know nothing about Google's product portfolio hold advisory roles around the products. They don't care, there's no one to even question them. They just know to make colourful graphs with the most useless metrics to justify they "add value" to the company. Expecting them to take accountability is like trying to mix oil and water.by neya
- The article strongly implies they have the (Python) source code, and that it looks LLM generated. I don't know about you, but I can usually tell LLM code from a mile away.by _alternator_