The attacker’s inexperience was also evident in his operational security failures. At one point he asked Claude to help edit his resume, which contained his full name, location, education history, and LinkedIn profile.
Later, while investigating a potential compromise of one of his own hosts, he inadvertently confirmed his home IP address to the agent. Based on this and other corroborating evidence, the researchers believe the attacker to be a young man based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Wow.
My takeaway from stories like this is that it was always really easy to crack in to companies, but most knowledgeable people had better things to do.
My feeling is companies leave themselves open by allowing everyone access to the network so the idiot who has been told 50 times not to click on a link in a suspicious email will still do it or hand out passwords to anyone on the phone. Even if you run a tight ship you’ll give access to some contractor who doesn’t.
A poor IT department is working overtime with limited funds for staff trying to fix stuff while bosses breathing down their necks.
script kiddies wrecking corporate security is funny
prompt kiddies doing it is just depressingAnd no-skilled attackers can buy exploits.
Claude helping is insignificant to the story.
The real headline should be:
At least 14 companies’ IT security is practically non-existent
It is significant because a random teenager can’t google “download exploits” and have them available 5mins later.
Powerful AI models and agents though are on your fingertips without you even asking.
Sure, people can buy guns. But what if every person could materialize a chainsaw instead regardless of their skill, maturity, age, or criminal record? 🤔
Teenagers are definitely able to find exploits via google in 5 if they’re motivated.
Buying a disassembled ak-47 on post order and having it shipped to your address anywhere in the world is also possible.
Rules only apply to people that care about them.
As someone who works in security, llms just make security happen or not happen faster.
I also work in security.
My company (which can damn well afford the costs) 100% REFUSES to leverage AI in any meaningful fashion. The CISO himself wrote the most braindead email to the CIO saying basically that AI isn’t a threat and then showed it to the rest of us like he’s proud of it.
I tried to push some adoption of AI based tools to help detect our own weaknesses and do some basic cleanup work. Nope. Stonewalled. I argued that every attacker is stealing accounts and burning tokens to tear us to shreds using every possible tools they can steal or even buy. We use Copilot.
Blank stares and crickets. We just keep managing our shit in spreadsheets that some dumbass emails as attachments and wonders why everyone has a different version of some useless thing.
At least they’re paying me well. When they collapse in a little while, I suppose I won’t be too surprised.
Didn’t think I’d ever side with no script kiddie but at this point fuck it.
If your company can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum in security then yeah I hope the least skilled hacker ever comes along and wrecks it.Thing is, with the latest frontier models, the least skilled person can find a crack in the most secure company around, as long as they can string a few sentences together.
It isn’t about “bare minimum” anymore. All it takes is a single lapse in vigilance from a single employee, and they’re in… and the LLM doesn’t have to pause to figure out what to do next.
Pentesters have access to LLMs too
some hacker unleashes malicious AIs to the internet, breaking it apart cause AI keeps finding vulnerabilities in everything and break things faster than humans can fix
corporates build corporate internet and the blackwall, which is AI to fight malicious AIs
Gooooood morning Night City!
Only for a year or so. Any company still vulnerable after these tools have been out long enough deserve it.
Most people on lemmy seem to condemn use of LLMs in any way for anything, I wonder what those folks opinion of this stance is - should companies use the tools or not?
Well the problem is that for example curl got flooded with generated security reports where only 5% had some true security potential. So your llm will basically flood you with false positives
If 5% of the reports are genuine security vulnerabilities that they wouldn’t have found otherwise, that’s looking like a big win to me, not sure how you see it differently.
The problem is identifying which 5%. Nobody wants to filter that much AI slop.
If you’re working for a company’s cybersec, that’s your job. And a much preferable one to waiting for an attacker to do it for you.
If you’re submitting a vulnerability to a public repo, that’s also your job. These slop reports that are wasting maintainers time should never have been reported. The person tasking the LLM is out of their depth and can’t be the human in the loop that verifies the vulnerability report before submitting because they don’t have the required knowledge to do that. It’s a shame, because if people who had the requisite knowledge were the ones submitting, the ratio of valid reports to noise would be way higher than 5% and open source maintainers wouldn’t be feeling burned the fuck out.
Sure, but nobody wants to do that, even at fair pay. Unpaid open source volunteer projects REALLY don’t want to do that, and risk burning out what is typically a solo main dev.
Cybersecurity is actually one of the few fields that can benefit from AI. There are companies like Horizon3 who are using it alongside their other threat models to do continuous pen testing.
Gonna take a guess here that what is used in cybersecurity is not LLMs but one of the more useful machine learning applications. Just a nitpick cause today “ai” and “LLM” are sadly synonymous.
No, LLMs can definitely be useful for cyber too. It’s the whole reason the US government banned Claude Fable for export.
An LLM can not just try existing exploits like a script kiddy, but with iteration it can try variations and if you know what runs on the server, inspect the source for potential exploits.
They can also look at your setup and say what issues they see (reverse proxy config, etc).
Doesn’t replace an expert, but can be useful for a first pass before you get the highly paid people involved.
You know what, fair enough. I don’t know enough about that particular one.
I do. I reverse engineered some proprietary software using an agent. A pro could’ve maybe done it faster, but I did it AFK with little knowledge about reverse engineering.
An agent could similarly try tons of attacks against online targets. Fairly sure some are doing it.
I would love to see the term ‘low-skilled’ used more often within the context of LLM’s and the manner in which people use them.
they fired hordes of tech people, and neglected cybersecurity in many companies. this was bound to happen.
The IT Paradox :
- “Why am I paying IT if everything works”
- “Why am I paying IT if nothing works”
Alternative title: the ubiquitous race for cheapest developers and fastest time to maket leaves everything insecure.
“low skill prompts”
😂
Bad look for Claude after their vigorous insistence their model can’t be used this way.
Also bad look for the 50 people I get in my inbox telling me AI is completely useless every time I talk about it. These arguments were worthy of entertainment a few years ago but not in 2026.
AI (specifically LLM) isn’t unless unless you need it to be accurate. You don’t need to be accurate to find software vulnerabilities for example, you just need to be able to sift enough of the false positives to be able to identify the real bugs for example.
LLMs are over hyped and being given away below the cost of training and running the models in the hope of getting entrenched then ramping up the costs though.
Fair I agree it’s overhyped. But to be honest the amount I think it’s overhyped continues to decline as its capabilities continue to advance. And we’re at a point now where it is clearly useful for many tasks, even if it’s not appropriate for everything.
Wait until someone more skilled hacks the nuclear codes using AI and launches a few at US cities.
I really hope all of that is air gapped.
It probably was before the current assholes decided Grok needs access.
you need skills to type 0000-0000?
That’s the code for my luggage.
What a thumbnail!
