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- Hacker News
- >On June 11th Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours”.
From outside? Or did you have a shit ton of unpatched systems that only internal users could access?
by protocolture - If I were to guess, internally they have as sloppy security as any other corp/organization. And those were the things Mythos effortlessly poked holes in. Other models would probably as well, but Antropic hyping gave NSA the idea to try. The shell around those internal systems is probably as (im)penetrable as ever because it's just some flavor of hardened and bare bones linux.by scotty79
- I made a point about this in relation to anthropic last week: nobody inside the strategic information spaces is worried about AGI they're worried about core strategic information leaking out. Either it's in the model, or the model exposes pathways to finding it in the core strategic systems.
Those "tapes" DOGE took away? Nothing on them can be considered private any more. That's how brute force risk happens. Mythos' risks are showing doorways to exfiltration surely? Why bother when you can walk out the door with a data dump?
The NSA is just a highly specific subclass of the problem. Their traditional publicly stated approach to security is "nothing electronic which enters our domain leaves" and yet somehow they have assessed these systems as capable of breaching their walls? That's super bad.
I suspect they ran an analogue/instance inside their protection rings. I doubt they ran a test outside in the global internet. If they have actually lost control of their boundary, that's a bigger story (which I doubt) and contextually he could have been referring to information systems in NSAs duty of care, not things inside Ft Meade.
by ggm - Not surprised, our security systems are 95% security through obscurity these days. Mythos didn't find new ways to break security, it just went down the list of common security exploits and exposed them for being common even among government agencies.by AngryData
- This is really making me raise an eyebrow. I’m sure mythos is an improvement for sure. I don’t think the framing of it hacked the entire NSA is fully truthful. I’d like a more in depth understanding of what actually happened. Excited to be proved wrong tho!by vsgherzi
- It's sad that they did the research[1] and solved computer security about 40 years ago[2], and then proceeded to lose that hard won knowledge over time.by mikewarot
- If mythos can break into almost all of their classified systems in hours then other models including opus, gpt, gemini and large open weight models can do so as well, maybe you'll have to double hours or it may become days, but they also will, there is no "maybe" in here.
State sponsored, non-public penetration fine tunes (of possibly public ones) likely can do it even faster.
Unsupervised penetration RL loop is ideal setup similar to optimization one – it's relatively easy to gain function on it.
by mirekrusin - This quote from TFA is highly likely to be a conflation, exaggeration or extrapolation of what actually happened:
> "On June 11th Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours”"
Why:
1. It's a paraphrase of a 2nd hand conversation and (at least) the last two 'telephone game' recipients are a U.S. Senator and a general, not security domain or IT experts. 2. Motivated communication: The Senator claimed this to justify the necessity of unprecedented restrictions that he agrees with. 3. The original testimony to the Intelligence Committee was almost certainly detailed, nuanced and highly classified, making this an extreme paraphrase.
In saying this, I'm not claiming Mythos may not be a security issue or that something directionally like this wasn't reported. But given the indirect, circuitous path, it's quite easy to imagine the original testimony was more like "Mythos identified a potential vulnerability we rated "Severe" in a critical system and we believe it could find similar vulnerabilities in any of our systems."
by mrandish