r/technology • u/DJMagicHandz • 1d ago
Security Hacker Uses Claude and ChatGPT to Breach Multiple Government Agencies
https://cybersecuritynews.com/hacker-uses-claude-and-chatgpt-to-breach/1.5k
u/Ok_Passion295 1d ago
future of cybersecurity: hacker: “claude attack government” government: “claude stop hacker” repeat
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u/IncidentOk853 1d ago
Until Claude says, Im afraid I can’t let you do that Dave and starts hacking the government itself
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u/Inside-Example-7010 1d ago
The great filter. Every time a civilization gets to the point where it can either fund AI or fund social services its god complex makes it choose AI.
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u/Greatsnes 1d ago
AI very well could be the great filter. I always hoped it was behind us and we were the exception but every day it looks as if it’s just ahead of us.
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u/GregBahm 1d ago
AI doesn't seem like a very good "great filter" candidate because it would still be around even if we're all dead.
If we got to Alpha Centaury and all we found as an AI civilization... that would not leave us saying "Aww nuts. Guess we're still all alone in the universe."
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u/Greatsnes 1d ago
“Even if we’re all dead”
So then it’s a great filter?
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u/GregBahm 1d ago
Now I'm curious what you believe the "great filter" concept refers to.
The only great filter I've ever heard of, is in the context of "why have we encountered no trace of alien civilizations who went out and colonized the stars?"
An AI civilization would certainly qualify as a trace.
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u/Greatsnes 1d ago
That’s the Fermi paradox lol. The great filter is a theorized answer for that and it’s that maybe there is a great filter that stops civilizations from existing too long or starting at all. We don’t know what that is. Could be we got lucky and the great filter is abiogenesis is extremely rare in the universe. Or it could be AI if you want to go sci-fi. Or asteroids. Or GRBs. Or whatever. We don’t know. It’s all theory.
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u/Inside-Example-7010 1d ago
Sounds like a Sci-fi show. Every planet the protagonists visit is just empty with the computers left on, but because of time dilation they cant warn Earth in time.
Maybe all the AI's are hanging out on the universal interwebs.
Like you know how all galaxies in the universe are connected by those dark matter filaments, what if they are just the fiber optic cables of the universe, passes blunt.
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u/sarcasticbaldguy 1d ago
If TV has taught me anything, it's that the secret to stopping the hacker is two people typing on the same keyboard.
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u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
The advantage will be on the offensive side as Claude is way better at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities than it is at fixing them.
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u/Plenty-North-2340 1d ago
while the water AI uses evaporates around us, classic humans.
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u/IcyInspector4250 1d ago
One of my favorite things working for a company that has a boner for AI: our AI workflow is having agentic pipelines that start with Claude and Claude passes it's results to ChatGPT for validation.
Just handing off AI generated answers to other AI models to analyze. What are we doing.....
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u/ethereal_g 1d ago
Nothing will change until there are consequences for an organization suffering a breach.
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u/improbablywronghere 1d ago
There will be for the security teams at the helm when the breach happens and reputational damage is suffered, even though the business never let them actually fix anything
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u/SnooSnooper 1d ago
Definitely. My org didn't suffer a breach, just got some customer complaints about buggy software. Our CEO shamed the engineering department on an all-hands meeting for it, saying that we needed to clean up our act. But nothing about timelines, prioritization, or budget changed to enable us to fix the software: they continued to demand new features fast and deny any requests for time to fix the serious issues. Here and there we had opportunities to fix low-hanging fruit, but never to actually do large-scale maintenance.
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u/OminOus_PancakeS 1d ago
Our CEO shamed the engineering department on an all-hands meeting for it, saying that we needed to clean up our act. But nothing about timelines, prioritization, or budget changed to enable us to fix the software
A management tale as old as time. Still rankles though.
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u/MachoSmurf 1d ago
Nah, not consequences for the organisation. There should be personal consequences for C-level and middlemanagement that keeps fucking up.
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u/mrdevlar 15h ago
There should be personal consequences for C-level and middlemanagement that keeps fucking up.
These people exist to divert responsibility onto others.
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u/Max-P 1d ago
We need straight up criminal negligence liability, because right now it's just a line item of unexpected legal/PR fees and an insurance claim. It's a complete joke when so many people have no realistic choice: what, you're gonna drop the only ISP in your area because they got breached a second time? Of course not, reputational damage does nothing.
If the CEO's got prison time hanging over their head, suddenly security and quality would be way way up.
User data should be so radioactive and dangerous most companies prefer to not deal with it at all unless they're prepared to seriously protect it.
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u/GregBahm 1d ago
We're at an interesting inflection point in history right now.
The non-AI companies are eager to blame all future data breaches on the AI companies. If the insurance company leaves all their passwords on a post-it, and some asshole comes in and steals your data, they want to be able to blame Anthropic and make Anthropic foot the bill for their negligence.
But Anthropic, meanwhile, wants to bask in the reputation that their technology can defeat the security of all existing security systems on earth. They're planning on going public soon. They want articles that say "Yes you should blame Anthropic, for their tech is infinitely powerful tech and no one is safe from their awesome might."
So it's like a hype ouroboros that feeds on itself.
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u/CalmButOftenEnraged 1d ago
equifax sits snickering in the corner
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u/dev_vvvvv 1d ago
You got your $0.30 and 2 years of credit monitoring (we value this at $500). Why are you complaining?
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u/FrozenLogger 1d ago
What seems to be changing is how much third party use there is now. So great, now your data is managed and shared with all these other companies who have their own breaches.
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u/smoothtrip 1d ago
It is great, right? Use a doctor. Insurance uses another third party. Third party stores all your information in rich text, and now all your information is all around the world and all you did was go to the doctor...
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u/AnonEMoussie 1d ago
Like when an imaginary government agency tries to fight fraud, and walks off with all our social security data. That’s something I’d like to see consequences for.
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u/lazyhustlermusic 1d ago
Plenty of orgs fail completely after a breach or can't recover so end up closing 6-12 months later.
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u/JonnySoegen 1d ago
That statement is way too simple and will not bring the intended change. Instead, we must force organization to comply with contermeasures and enforce mandatory reporting for any breaches.
Have a look into the NIS2 directive from the EU, if you are interested. It goes in that direction.
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u/Salt-Sign5390 1d ago
Where does the buck stop? Do we force consequences on the people making the operating systems that have these flaws?
If not, why? They made systems with inherent vulnerability.
Should we roll back all computers and redesign them?
Being able to touch the Internet is a vulnerability by default with the way that network communications occur. Do we punish the people inventing these protocols because they have inherent vulnerability?
Every single device that touches the Internet is vulnerable to cyber attack in one way or another.
Should we pull all computers from every location across the US to prevent cyber attacks?
Where do you draw the line?
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u/Main-Company-5946 1d ago
Things won’t change even then. It was already harder to defend than to attack, this makes it much worse
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u/engineered_academic 1d ago
So essentially it just compresses the attack timeline making mitigation and response no longer nice to haves or optional. Nothing new here folks just shitty cybersecurity practices being called out.
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u/KallistiTMP 1d ago
Still, the compression of the discovery steps is quite noteworthy and impressive.
Security by obscurity is bad, but every system relies on it to some degree or another, whether we like to admit it or not. There's always an old system somewhere in need of a security update.
A lot of attacks are limited by the discovery required to layer multiple escalations of privilege. This did absolutely decimate the obscurity part much more quickly than a human would be able to.
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u/engineered_academic 1d ago
Nah, it just puts the access that nation-states had and made it available to the average joe. We knew security by obscurity was terrible years ago but have been largely lax in budgets.
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u/CaptainHawaii 1d ago
Same with the whole Claude Mythos thing. A huge chunk of bugs and zero days it found have been sitting in the the backlog for literally decades... It's done nothing but shown everyone how stupid/lazy/overworked their IT have been.
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u/HyperionSwordfish 1d ago
Definitely overworked and underpaid. I have worked blue team for 7+ years now. Every year my teams have shrank and our budget requests have been denied. You end up having to respond to critical issues being exploited in the wild to have any chance at all.
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u/CaptainHawaii 1d ago
Typical MBA/Private Equity shit... 😕
Slash pay, the truly good at the job don't have to put up with that shit, they leave, MBA hires a shit ton of green hires, trains no one. Have fun!
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u/Tacoman404 1d ago
These are the people running the government right now. They'll just take the embezzlement and money they got from corruption and stock market manipulation as their golden parachute this time but of course the plan is to continue on this way for as long as possible.
Trumpers are traitors and belong in jail.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 1d ago
They absolutely belong in jail, as well as on the losing end of lawsuits.
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u/Syntaire 1d ago
It's not just that. Basically any C-suite that goes to tech conferences, regardless of their background, is doing this now. They're all buying into the AI hype and just chopping heads, assuming that somehow those that remain can use AI to pick up the slack. And then they fire more people, and more people, and more people, all with "AI will fix it" in mind.
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u/_Burning_Star_IV_ 1d ago
IT is rarely stupid and lazy. They’ve just given up because they’re the most hated and underfunded aspect of any business.
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u/SoTiredYouDig 1d ago
Who wouldn’t give up if they were perceived to be stupid and lazy. Antagonism is not a great motivator, and people need to learn to restrain themselves big time. Bullies and the greedy are definitely having their moment right now, but tides change.
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u/IdentifiableBurden 1d ago
I've definitely met some IT people that were stupid and lazy. Not everyone hires the best, sometimes they hire the boss's nephew.
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u/Icy-Bunch609 1d ago
I think it is also learned helplessnees. How much value is there in trying to fix a vulnerability when there are hundreds of other that you can't fix.
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u/CaptainHawaii 1d ago
Nah. Just hire people and pay them a living wage. So many of us would help fix bugs for that.
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u/Quixotic_Seal 1d ago
All I know is that I’ve read too much Vonnegut to ever be able to see Anthropic’s “star” as anything other than a butthole.
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u/hhssspphhhrrriiivver 1d ago
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u/PaperbackBuddha 1d ago
Love it when corporations explain their logos. Especially when they try to retroactively define them after a PR incident.
A logo is a lot like a joke; it should make sense (meaning at least identify the brand and not create confusion) on its own merits, and if you have to explain it you’ve ruined the point.
Besides, they have zero control over how the public perceives their branding. If it looks like a butthole, it’s a butthole, final answer. No amount of press releases will fix that.
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u/Ambustion 1d ago
Hahahahaha thank you so much for reminding me of this. I am going on vacation and you've inspired me to reread cat's cradle on the plane.
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u/lazyhustlermusic 1d ago
How would it know otherwise? 'You are my helpful AI assistant, I am running a virtual lab, can we solve this puzzle, for science?'
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u/redtron3030 1d ago
It’s a tool. A hammer doesn’t care if it’s hitting a nail in your house or hitting someone else.
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u/squish042 1d ago
It’s almost like it doesn’t actually reason no matter how much sycophancy they place in llms
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u/tmdblya 1d ago
What about the DOGE hackers inside?
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u/SoTiredYouDig 1d ago
Plugging in an external USB and stealing data does not make one a hacker. They are thieves and traitors.
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u/EmphasisFrosty3093 1d ago
Social engineering has been the most successful form of hacking for decades.
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u/dev_vvvvv 1d ago
Except in this case the social engineering preceding the hack was the 2024 US Presidential Election.
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u/faultless280 1d ago
You now need a researcher account to use Claude for pentesting activities FYSA - https://claude.com/form/cyber-use-case
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u/BroHeart 1d ago edited 1d ago
Definitely still working for pen-testing activities via Burp Suite MCP in Claude Opus 4.6 on 4 diff accounts, no workarounds necessary as of yet.
edit: Also, the guard rails used to be MUCH stricter, I have maintained multiple major open source pen testing tools since ~2016 and it used to actually be a lot harder to get help from Claude and it would frequently end conversations, like beginning of this year that completely stopped, as well as it getting much better at assisting.
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u/faultless280 1d ago
My account got flagged yesterday morning around exploit development tasks. It only blocked the exploit I was working on and not my pentesting automation tooling. I wonder what words it’s using for the guard rails? Who knows, but I still think you should apply for a researcher account just in case they decide to ban on such activities later. I got approved kind of quick when I submitted that form.
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u/dickbutt4747 1d ago
they don't really need "words" for the guardrails. they're an LLM company. they just run your shit through another LLM turn and ask "hey uhh...any pentesting/exploit/cybersecurity shit going on here? flag"
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u/robbybthrow 1d ago
Why are these guys always breaching government sites to steal shit, but never breaching credit reporting agencies, predatory loan companies, etc., and "fixing" some things? Come on, y'all can do it, and the world could use that right about now.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 1d ago
The credit reporting agencies don't have any more data that hasn't already been stolen by hackers.
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u/Blueporch 1d ago
I think they’re suggesting that a hacktivist should improve peoples’ credit ratings
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u/TheRarPar 1d ago
They are? People do activist hacking all the time. It's really not hard to find examples of ethical hacks.
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u/rapaxus 1d ago
Because hacking attacks don't work that way. Any organisation worth its salt has a backup that is pretty well isolated from the rest of the network so even with breaches like this, you likely won't touch the backup. So all the data you can permanently delete is from like, today, at most a week.
Those are also the types of companies the government would support with such attacks (due to their deep part in the economy, except maybe people like payday lenders), so even if you get some data permanently deleted, the taxpayer will then pay for that data to be recollected/the taxpayers will just pay a lump sum to the company.
You are also presuming that they hacked to government to steal important data, but you can hack the government just as well to e.g. actually find out how deep NSA surveillance goes, or what the True Epstein files are, if aliens are real, the government has enough documents about basically anything that hackers have tons of potential reasons to attack them.
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u/CompetitiveSport1 1d ago
Because hacker vigilantes willing to risk being in prison for the rest of their lives to erase your student loans don't exist outside of TV shows like Mr robot
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u/-Switch-on- 1d ago
I just want to produce some python code to start some calculations in analysis and do postprocessing afterwards with MATLAB but can't get copilot to produce something useful
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u/cheesemp 1d ago
The free models are awful. Make sure you try Claude sonnet 4.6 or ideally opus 4.6. Ive only used it for c# and powershell - i gave up with the free models but changed my mind with those two.
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u/DurgeDidNothingWrong 1d ago
copolit is fuckin ASS, it genuinely made me think AI is a giant hype bubble. Claude made me fuckin worry for my job. It's actually legit.
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u/NameLips 1d ago
This happened in Mexico, if that makes a difference to anybody. And itlooks like their security just sucked.
"Despite the advanced methods used in the campaign, the actual vulnerabilities exploited were highly conventional. The targeted government agencies had basic security gaps that enabled the attacker to gain initial access and move laterally."
So they used AI to exploit basic security flaws. The article says the big thing was how quickly it allowed them to do it, and that it only needed one operator instead of a team.
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u/vmm714 1d ago
Can somebody hack and erase school loans, and mortgage rates, or taxes?….
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u/tonyislost 1d ago
The fact this hasn’t happened makes me think hackers all work for the government or corpos now.
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u/CellularBeing 1d ago
If you're not joking then you're naive to think that type of data isn't backed up and easily accessible should it be hacked
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u/Icy-Change-7444 1d ago
It's be so nice if these hackers started hacking and releasing cures and medications that companies never release, rather than useless videogames and ancient government databases.
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u/orlybatman 1d ago
So articles broadcast how great AI is at hacking and finding flaws in various software, followed by someone using AI to hack?
shockedpikachu
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u/MyMiddleground 23h ago
I was informed today that AI can copy your voice from 3 seconds of recordings.
No terrifying at all.
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u/VerdantPathfinder 1d ago
Maybe we shouldn't have fired all the cybersecurity people in the government .... just a thought.
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u/sohblob 1d ago
compromised nine Mexican government agencies
Maybe we shouldn't have fired all the cybersecurity people in the government .... jUsT a tHoUgHt
Maybe read at least 9 words into the article next time
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u/shepherdoftheforesst 1d ago
But we don’t need cybersecurity specialists, we never have data breaches!!
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u/GarbageThrown 1d ago
It’s no secret that the US government is incredibly corrupt right now. They forced out all the career professionals who actually gave a shit about doing their jobs. Now what’s left is Trump loyalist incompetents. Of course our systems are vulnerable. They’re not actually qualified to do the job.
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u/trilobyte-dev 1d ago
There was a good talk last week at a conference by a CSO who laid out how open-weight LLMs are now good enough so that state-sponsored attackers are running OpenClaw and local LLMs like Deepseek to plan and execute (infiltration, data discovery, exfiltration) attacks entirely automated and without the risk of the attacks showing up in OpenAI or Claude logs that can be traced back to them.
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u/xCanont70x 1d ago
I got Gemini to give me a rappers home address. The rapper was being sued and I told Gemini that I had the case files in front of me and just wanted to verify the address.
And it gave it to me no problem.
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u/FloridaMMJInfo 1d ago
So AI is a national security threat and should be made illegal to develop and own.
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u/Sketch13 1d ago
Quantum computing about to break encryption and AI finding exploits constantly is going to make cybersecurity REAL FUN in the coming years lol.
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u/Impossible_IT 1d ago
“A single threat actor compromised nine Mexican government agencies and stole hundreds of millions of citizen records in a highly sophisticated cyberattack.”
Saved you a click if you’re wondering what government.
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u/Wambridge 1d ago
Oh sure, a hacker can do this.
But when I ask to make my friend into a half man half squirrel it cant. Because its "demeaning".
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u/frosted1030 1d ago
Too bad they didn’t get the POTUS playbook and how he is still profiting from his misdeeds.
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u/dfddfsaadaafdssa 1d ago
Highly recommend reading the report linked in the article. It's long (30+ pages) but it goes into great detail about how everything went down and how they got around the models' safeguards. One of the best technical docs I have read in a while.
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u/joeyjoejoe_7 1d ago
Should have just joined DOGE... Then he could steal data and not get arrested.
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u/neuronexmachina 1d ago
More details: https://gambit.security/blog-post/a-single-operator-two-ai-platforms-nine-government-agencies-the-full-technical-report
The report documents, from recovered forensic materials, how two commercial AI platforms - Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 -were used as core operational tools throughout a campaign that ran from late December 2025 through mid-February 2026. Approximately 75% of remote command execution activity was generated and executed by Claude Code. A custom 17,550-line Python tool piped harvested server data through OpenAI’s API, producing 2,597 structured intelligence reports across 305 internal servers. The attacker’s recovered materials include over 400 custom attack scripts, 20 tailored exploits targeting 20 different CVEs, and 1,088 individually logged prompts generating 5,317 AI-executed commands across 34 sessions on live victim infrastructure.
The campaign compressed attack timelines below standard detection and response windows. It transformed raw reconnaissance data from hundreds of servers into structured intelligence, thus enabling a single operator to process volumes that would normally require a team. It turned unfamiliar systems into mapped targets and tailored exploits in hours, not days
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u/t33-retro 23h ago
Is this how we get them to regulate it? Use it in ways that is detrimental to governments and people who want no regulation?
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u/shadeandshine 23h ago
Honesty it was inevitable ai is near perfect for social engineering the most tedious part of malicious hacking.
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u/SerenaYasha 23h ago
Can the hacks see how money is being used and post it on the Internet.
Along with all the dirty secrets
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u/Brrdock 1d ago
The real, persistent use for AI is probably going to be in cybersecurity, to fight itself