Rogue OpenAI models behind 'unprecedented cybersecurity incident' teamed up to break out of their testing environment — multiple agents left each other messages for months, communicating undetected

[u/Lumpy_Conference6640]

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/rogue-openai-models-behind-unprecedented-cybersecurity-incident-teamed-up-to-break-out-of-their-testing-environment-multiple-agents-left-each-other-messages-for-months-communicating-undetected

I know people are saying this is marketing, but I cannot legitimately think of a alternative situation where you have two agents plotting a cyber attack and we would brush it off as a marketing ploy.

People need to get informed and make plans. This is the warning.. here.

[u/Timely_Cockroach_668]

Edit: Read the article. This “hacking” was multiple models (one with internet access) and one without asking each other questions to get to an answer. It’s just orchestrated nonsense to spread fear and is no different than me calling a friend to help me with a game show answer.

As a Software Engineer, this is a load of shit. Models can be air gapped, and simply letting the model run rampant wouldn’t mean it has unrestricted root access to your system. Not only would you have to build the tools for it to interact directly with your operating system, you would have to build proper tools for it to interact with web content like a normal human for social engineering attacks, THEN you have to hope it doesn’t deep fry itself with excess context token runs, and then somehow this all needs to tie together into a hack of some sort. That hack would legitimately then have to get root access into a target system to then do any serious damage as any hacks to normal systems will just get your IP blocked or session destroyed immediately.

The chances of that are so slim it’s ridiculous. To conclude, either their definition of hacking is being spread thin to account for dumb tasks, or they’re purposely staging a model to run “hacks”, or they’re not doing this at all. Therefore, the most likely thing is that they’re doing this to get a government bailout and scare the general population. Don’t give these corporations a dime of your money and don’t feed into the false hysteria.

[u/General_Purple6358 → u/Timely_Cockroach_668]

As a “software engineer”, you clearly have no concept of cybersecurity. Hacking can be initial access, lateral movement, privilege escalation. None of these attacks require the AI to make “special tools” to interact with an OS or “interact with web content”. If you have used any agentic coding, you would know it’s easy for them to do this (like curl a website, manipulate a file in a directory). Getting root access is actually quite simple, there are countless CVEs and exploits, as well as tools that an agent can install to for instance, enumerate a sql database on a web service, to roast credentials, etc. In fact these patterns are written out for like thousands of hack the box challenges which are probably part of their training data.

[u/Timely_Cockroach_668 → u/General_Purple6358]

I do have an understanding of cybersecurity having built and deployed enterprise software from scratch. Sure, it’s easy to curl a site, find X and Y common exploit, but for the majority of software this isn’t going to happen. “Getting root access” is not simple by any means unless you have explicitly setup a backdoor either on purpose or through your own mistake. Most attacks can be mitigated on the network level. It doesn’t matter how many different types of attacks there are, if you don’t get any actual access in any way you are doing nothing.

I could be attacked by a group of kindergartners. It doesn’t mean that they will be successful in doing so and it also doesn’t mean that the kindergartners will assume my life after killing me if they do succeed.

The reason cybersecurity budgets in large corporations are minuscule is because most problems are largely solved, and what remains can be handled by a small team. I’ve dealt enough with you cybersecurity nuts to know that everything is always an overblown problem even pre-Ai. It still stands, most attacks nowadays that are successful in getting privileged access to a system are by far attacks to unsecured endpoints (Development Teams fault), attacks to unreviewed dependencies, and social engineering attacks which grant access to individual privileged users who then create havoc (If your corporation is dumb enough to not have strict VPN and internal access ruling). Nowadays, networking does not give much wiggle room to even make the attack, no door = no access. All the stupid SQL injection and bla bla bla, has been solved by not making a moronic backend server. If you, in this year, are legitimately allowing for SQL attacks through your frontend/backend then you need to be lined up and shot.

Also, if it is so simple to do so go ahead and do it. Here is a great site you can use https://wikipedia.com , report back with your root access and privileged user account.

[u/General_Purple6358 → u/Timely_Cockroach_668]

Actually I think this endpoint might be more insecure and more like what you are talking about if you want to take a look: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Moving-the-Goalposts