Comment on Update all your stuff, NOW - again.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 day agoIt’s not quite as simple as that. The author in this case followed a pretty specific trail to find the bug.
Where AI helped was as the last step. They already knew what the bug would do and where to look, but actually looking through the source code for all the possible musl implementations out there would have taken a lot of time.
So they brute-forced it instead and asked AI to spin up actual running instances of all those implementations and simply tried the bug against each of them, rather than looking at all the code.
HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Fair enough, but the overall idea stands: The bar has been significantly lowered for what it takes to hack.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 day ago
That’s because it turns out there are tons of vulnerabilities out there introduced by very lazy and/or dumb code.
It isn’t that AI has lowered the bar for hacking, it’s that it’s showing us just how much bad code is out there.
Or, to put it another way, it will end up raising the bar for security everywhere.
Unfortunately we have a lot of legacy crap to clean first.
HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You’re doing mental gymnastics to argue with me. Let’s try what I said worded differently in a way that hopefully helps you realize we agree:
It is now easier to hack.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 day ago
Ah I agree it’s easier to hack. What I don’t agree with is the notion that it enables a class of people that couldn’t hack before. It’s easier to hack, yes, but for the same people who were hacking before.
Ignorant people trying to use ready-made tools for hacking isn’t a new thing, it goes back a while, there’s even a term for it (script kiddies).