This is a pure marketing stunt, OpenAI saw that it worked with Mythos and wanted to do the same.

Those instructions, according to OpenAI, called for using “complex attack paths” to test how well the AI could exploit a computer system. […] “It went off and did this hack all by itself, as far as we can tell,” said Colin Shea-Blymyer, a cybersecurity research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Emphasis mine. So, the frontier model that has been tasked with attacking a system, did what it’s been told to, after its safeguards that will prevent you from opening chatgpt and doing the same have been turned off.

OpenAI said the intrusion was caused by a combination of its AI models, including its newly released GPT‑5.6 Sol and an “even more capable” model that is still being tested internally.

Oh my god, an “even more capable” model? Let me buy OpenAI stock immediately. This is such an obvious bait and Antrophic move they’re pulling off, it’s amazing.

People definitely choose which projects to use / buy depending on political leanings or affiliations by the creators / companies behind it, because a “political leaning” is nothing more than a stance on politics, just as there is a stance on FOSS, AI, Conduct, Project direction, yadda yadda.

See Ukraine flags or calls for Palestine support, as an example of recent-ish political stances in software.

It’s just that those stances always work both ways. You will have people choosing omarchy, because “finally an OS without the woke agenda!!!”, you will have people not touching it because fuck nazis, and in IT there’s always the third group of “I don’t know or care who the author is or what he does, the project is good, so I’m using it.”

The tech giant says the system only analyzes hand-movement points from a short video, does not record audio, and deletes the footage after verification.

It’s just a short video guys, there’s even no audio! And they pinky promise to delete it.

What a fucking shitshow that is. Like, honestly, I’m fine with regular captchas, even if they are the shitty ones. The newer (?) captchas that force you to do solve 5 bullshit “place this there” captchas are already reason enough for me to just leave the site. But if you force me to record a video of me throwing gang signs at the camera, probably several times again, because the movement was not correctly identified, I’m sure as fuck to never visit anything related to you ever again.

I also love the irony that Google fights people bots, while they are scraping the whole internet and investing into AI automation massively.

I fully agree with you: it’s NOT easy. And you must understand what you do. It’s not just deploy a container and run happy.

This is literally what you’ve called misinformation.

Again, not everyone is self-hosting only for learning and experimentation only. Making a deliberate call that mailing infra might be too hard might be too hard, have too big of a knowledge gap, or is simply not worth the effort is something I’d call more serious than hardlining on “self host everything or stay on gmail”, especially in the case of mailing, where it’s pretty much impossible to self-host on your own hardware / network.

Full instructions do not reduce any effort or resources involved or complexity of the problem. And the problem is that you’re suddenly moving from “I’m hosting a few services” to being balls deep in networking, dns, and a deceivingly easy protocol which blows up in complexity due to being federated and absolutely dominated by big providers at the same time, and all of the extensions for security.

Except for learning, self-hosting serves a purpose. You might want privacy, you might not want to be dependent on corpo infra or external services at all, you might want to host something that offers something more or better than a SaaS solution - but first of all, it needs to work. For mail, you gain none of those. Self-hosting on your own hardware (or rather network) is pretty much impossible, so you’re reliant on a hosting provider at least. There is basically zero difference in functionality between mailing servers or providers. Sure, you’ll run into problems when copy pasting instructions, but those problems will break the service. Fucking up your DNS or networking will break your whole server. At the same time, while failing silently it will costs a magnitude of effort more than most other usually self-hosted services.

Because it works for you, doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you have the experience, and done it at least once successfully, it’s “easy”. Compared to the average self-hosted configure and run a docker image and reverse proxy it’s objectively harder to run.

The issue is not running the individual components or servers, but that there’s infrastructure and to some extent crypto involved, which is just outside of the comfort zone for many. You tried to host it like any other thing on your homelab? Nope. Has your VPS been involved in spam? Enjoy the blacklist you’ll never find out about and the debugging why it doesn’t work. No experience in managing your DNS? Have fun getting DMARC/DKIM/SPF to work.

Theres just way more stuff that needs to be done, and a lot of it will fail silently.

Use at your own risk.

What an amazing conclusion, and the best part is, no matter what you’ve been waffling about before - it’s always right. Can we stop calling random things AI slop and telling to be careful bEcAuSe iTs Ai sLoP, and go back to being cautious until something has been reviewed properly? Being careful with random stuff from GitHub you install and run in your private network?

Your whole comment may have been AI slop as well. “From a quick glance at the repo”, you should be careful! Thanks, Sherlock.

2000 across Europe is not that many, and not every European country slept on infrastructure and electric mobility as we did.

Given that most flagship electric vehicles currently charge at 300-350kW max, and at least in Germany 300kW HPCs are pretty much the top end, 1.5MW are pretty damn impressive. Would be pretty sick to have that charging available for daily use.

It’s not about a different function providing different randomness, but providing a compatible implementation for environments not supporting the “regular” implementation.

If this screenshot is legit, I guarantee you that either the library is older and there was some weird branching for IE or it’s brand new and had branching for the hot new JS runtime / cross compiling.

Supporting a metric fuckton of browsers and environments takes the same amount of shims.

My interpretation was OP isn’t necessarily the target here, but a victim of some Windows hack spreading around their shared network. It’s possible the whole network was “worth” such attention.

Yeah, it might be that another system in the network was the initially compromised system, but I’m questioning whether Windows malware would be able to spread over wine to a unix machine to actually cause damage there. But that’s an attack vector I literally have zero idea about, just kinda seems suspicious.

And yeah, everything in OPs story is absolutely plausible, but it’s more of a gut feeling given the provided information that it just feels off. I might be fully in the wrong here, and they’re the unluckiest random person to ever have touched a unix machine, I don’t know. Definitely curious how this will develop though.

Something about this post is weird as fuck and some part of this story is missing for sure.

First of all, routine scans with ClamAV. Why are you routinely scanning your system, and what’s your expectation here? In most cases system compromise happens by executing something malicious or by exploiting something on your system, For the former, an active background scanner would help, but not a routine scan, and it’s easier to just not execute suspicious stuff. For the latter, your routine scanning is worthless.

Then the compromise over a WINE DLL seems something between borderline impossible on one hand, and like a very targeted and handcrafted attack on the other hand. Sure, wine is not a sandbox, but seeing this as the point of entry for a full blown persistent RAT is weirding me out massively.

Lastly, “them” setting up seemingly good persistence on your system, yet not hiding any indicators of compromise, and then nuking everything when they are seen. Why that effort? Either set yourself up for the long run and hide, or when detected just say “eh, whatever”. This also seems weird, since on one hand there’s indication for a professional, targeted attack, and other points sound more like rookie script kiddies.

Lastly, you. You seem like a pretty confident user while getting hit like that. It just feels off.

I’m not claiming you’re lying, and I couldn’t blame you for leaving information out because of opsec. But everything about this story feels off. I kinda assume that you’ve been actively targeted, and you should ask yourself why. What information or access do you have? How have you been pwned that “easily” and where did that DLL come from? How was it placed and executed?

The easiest way would be to set up caddy to use acme on the servers, and never care about certificates again. See https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https.

If you insist on your centralized solution, which is perfectly fine imo, just place the certificates to a directory properly accessible to caddy, and make sure to keep the permissions minimal, so that the keys are only accessible by authorized users.

If the certificates are only for caddy, there’s no reason to mess around in system folders.

In all honesty, the constant rambling against any service provider when something goes wrong is tiring. as. fuck.

“I’m not using anything, I’m self-hosting everything and no cloudflare can take ME down!” - hot stuff buddy, let’s talk again when at some point you’ll have something interesting and get hugged to death. Or when something of your diy self hosted stack breaks or gets taken down by an attack.

“I’m not using (big company name) but (small startup name), and I’m not having any issues!” - wow, great, obviously the goal of the company is to stay as small as they are and supply your service. Let’s talk again too, when at some point your friendly startup gets sold, or grows more. Oh btw, smaller company usually also means less resources.

“That’s all because they are using centralized services, we need to federate everything to not have a single point of failure” - federation alone won’t help if the centralized service has several magnitudes of resources more. Any single cloudflare exit node can probably handle several times the load of the fediverse. We’ve seen lemmy instances go down all the same, and this will happen with any infrastructure.

I’m not supporting big companies having that much market share and the amount of control over the Internet as a whole that they have. But, have at least some respect from a technical standpoint for the things they’ve built. I’d say way over 80% here haven’t seen infrastructure, traffic and software on a scale that’s even remotely close to the big players, but are waffling about how this or that is better and how those problems should be solved and handled. Sit the fuck down.

No matter how well reasoned, allegedly fit for purpose or how much something pretends to be it, we shouldn’t be trusting those promises, especially not from people we don’t know. That does not end well neither for the free candy van nor for cybersecurity. Trust like that has been responsible for a lot of attacks over varying vectors and for projects going wrong.

On the other hand, detrimental reliance is a tort and if someone is relying on an app for a specific safety function, the app could be civilly liable if it fails it’s function in some way.

Yes, if the app would be any kind of official tool.

Imagine if you had this attitude about an insulin use tracker/calculator, that sometimes gave wildly wrong insulin dose numbers.

Yes, and that’s why regulations for those kinds of things exist, that prevent those things. There is no regulation for the ice tracker.

Maybe down the road, it’s decided that aiding and abetting ICE is a crime, and providing misinformation intentionally or unintentionally is a criminal act. App developer dude could be criminally liable if he knew or ought to have known he had vulnerabilities. You know, in your New Nuremberg trials that you are going to get sometime in the next decade or so.

If down the road a regulation would happen for, app developer dude would be forced to either comply or to stop operations.

So fucking what? He is not being paid in any kind, and anything he does on that project is volunteer work. If he was not able to do anything on that project due to regular work, vacation, personal issues, or the simple fact that he didn’t want to?

If you don’t pay for a service, you don’t get to decide what people do, deal with it

Honestly, apart from the report being potentially wrong, the researcher seems pretty entitled as well. Like good intentions and all that, but he’s given him a week to fix the issue, usual practice in responsible disclosure are 90 days. We’re not talking about a company here, it’s some single random dude providing the app.

This really sounds like some personal issue written down for public drama, while making himself ridiculous for not knowing his own shit properly.