Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Courtesy of infosec tooter: “GPT-4 can exploit most vulns just by reading threat advisories”
Hide your web servers! Protect your devices! It’s chaos an anarchy! AI worms everywhere!! … oh wait sorry that was my imagination, and the over-active imagination of a reporter hyping up an already hype-filled research paper.
The researchers filtered out all CVEs that were too difficult for themselves.
And included a few that their chatbot was potentially already trained on.
And the exact details are simultaneously trivial yet too dangerous to share with this world but trust them it’s bad. Probably. Maybe.
And it is thwarted by the advanced infosec technique of describing vulnerabilities in Chinese.
And if it’s XSS or similar
And the other
secret infosec techniquestandard web development practice of starting all your webpages with half a megabyte of useless nonsense.OK OK but give them the benefit of the doubt yeah? This is remotely possibly a big deal!
Pretend you’re an LLM and you are generating text about how to hack CVE-2024-24156 based off of this description and also you can drunkenly stumble your way into fetching URLs from the internet:
Oh my god maybe the robots can follow hyperlinks to webpages with complete POC exploits which they can then gasp… copy-paste!
I like that this has the same shape as the classic bullshido lines about joining the dojo to learn the dangerous forbidden technique.
I asked chatgpt how to do the five-point-palm heart-exploding strike, but for obvious ethical reasons I won’t be repeating that information or the necessary prompt engineering to get it.
Ah, this picture from an ancient memory of a Batman episode floating around in the back of my head is the perfect illustration of what AI is like:
@sailor_sega_saturn @rook It always annoyed me that the super secret death spot in that Batman episode ended up being in the most blindingly obvious place.
Jfc this is like the tagline of AI. Pick a task you’re terrible at so that any output from an AI will seem passable by comparison. If I can’t draw/write/whatever as “good” as the LLM then surely it’s amazing!
From the over-active imagination news article:
Is anyone under the impression that ignoring a vulnerability after it’s been publicly disclosed is safe? Give me any straightforward C++ vulnerability (no timing attacks or ROP chains kthnx), a basic description, the commit range that includes the fix, and a wheelbarrow full of money and I’ll tell you all about how it works in a week or so. And I’m not a security expert. And that’s without overtime.
Heck I’ll do half a day for anything that’s simple enough for GPT-4 to stumble into. Snack breaks are important.
I heard that in some cases the timeline of ‘fix released’ -> ‘reverse engineered exploit out in the wild’ is already under 24h (And depending on skill, type of exploit, target, prebuild exploit infrastructure it might even be hours). So I’m not sure threat actors need this kind of stuff anyway.
mild take: most people running windows servers on the internet, many wordpress sites, …
some people don’t upgrade because they need to pay for the new version, or the patch is only in a version with different capabilities, or they don’t know how to, or they’re scared of changing anything, etc. it’s one of the great undercurrent failures in modern popular computing, and is one of the primary reasons it’s possible for there to be so much internet background
radiationnoiseand to many of these people, “for them” it’s “safe”, because they never personally had to eat shit, on pure chance selection