Hacker News

Worked at a Fortune 200 company. Any govt project you worked on, you had have to have a basic civi security clearance. Any govt contract we got specifically stated you couldn't have off shore folks working on any of the code. Not sure how MS got around those requirements.

Google at least has been investing very heavily into cloud security. They acquired Mandiant ($5.4 billion) and Wiz ($32 billion). Many people felt those were very expensive acquisitions at the time, but maybe it seems like a wise move now.

I mean, Microsoft and Security, those two words have never really been associated with each other in a serious conversation.

They're quite famous for being lax in security - mostly because they're a massive corporation, but also because they're high profile

It would seem Google account details have been compromised or otherwise correlated, with not a peep from Google, we are getting reports of scam calls to people's real phone numbers about the "business opportunity" available in their attached Youtube properties.

Another possibility is advertising shadow profiles are able to correlate logged in accounts across YouTube and other properties.

Is this the point where most tech people accept that anything a closed source Software company says about security is effectively a "Trust me bro" as long as it is not backed up by independent verification?

We love to talk rubbish about finance bros but that industry has had independent auditing as part of its DNA for a century[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act

Yes. Literally AI is being used by actual nation state adversaries to compromise bits of infrastructure that companies rely on to run their services. They are compromising this infrastructure specifically because they seek to gain advantage against their adversary (us).

> ...the operational and economic condition in which a nation, military force, or organization mobilizes its resources, industries, and policies as if an actual state of war exists...

Yes?

Your words are comment-shaped.

Sorry but how in the world would that help with anything? You can't control an adversary, that's not how adversaries work. So that makes what you said a literal cop out.

Buddy you're nearly 20 years too late for Bill Gates to be making any decisions at MS.

> If everything is more bespoke the attack surface is smaller

This is exactly the problem that LLM assisted attacks solve. For a human attacker, the extra work to figure out a bespoke solution is too time consuming to be worth the effort. LLMs can search for vulnerabilities and spit out bespoke attacks like it's nothing. On top of this the bespoke solutions weakness leans heavily into the AI attackers advantage: response time. Even if they can just get your company's single Anthropic key, if they do it at 2am while your one infra person is on vacation, they have plenty of time to extract enough value for their effort.

I agree with the move to hyperscalers. The future (well, actually present) is going to be constantly seeing new attacks happening. The only real solution to this going to be having teams of people and agents constantly watching for these and able to deploy fixes and respond to risks immediately.

How is that ever going to work out? The speed of discovery for LLMs is so fast, these places are getting breached more often than not due to a human errors. Its really hard for machines, let alone humans, to guard against a lot of LLMs going against them 24x7.

This is absolutely happening. I'm not a developer in SV, I'm an IT leader out on customer land, and I can tell you a LOT of companies are looking to bring things back on prem for security and cost reasons. And before anyone laughs, yes, you ABSOLUTELY can save money going on prem, I've done it for company after company. It's one reason the PE firm that I've worked under for a decade kept moving me to new companies.

This is misguided thinking. You are less likely to hear about on-prem breaches in the news just because they are less likely to be newsworthy incidents, but they are even more likely to happen. Part of the reason people moved to the cloud is because it is much easier to have a team manage updates and security at scale.

Being a small target is not helpful these days, attacks on on-prem software today simply scans the internet, or uses databases by people who have already scanned it, and is automated.

On-prem software has not been spared from the recent spat of security incidents.

My comment[0] tries to explain the nuance and I would agree with you and both the GP in some sense.

For Entreprise, the shift will be towards hyperscalers as they want trust and less blame (Nobody got fired for picking AWS)

For consumers, we care about pricing and stability and control and we will move back to our own hardware or cheap VPS providers and self-host things.

The middle ground would be where the slight pain could be at in my opinion.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307410

It's probably both.

Cost of hacking a custom setup is going down rapidly. There was broad agreement that the PHP vulnerability was very difficult to exploit in practice. It took two hours for someone to get into Steal My Bitcoin. Apparently all they did was tell a decent model "go exploit that." AI isn't free but it's not that expensive.

No thats an old way of thinking because it assumes mass targets are better because hacking is a high effort activity. But with the automation of intellect the unpatched systems (which a much more numerous when everyone self hosts) is the key point.

Mass credential stealing is just the top funnel of hacking and (compatativly) isnt that lucrative - these credentials are then sold on the black markets to the next step of hackers who use them to exploit targets.

With unpatched systems and self hosting, this second group can just set an llm at a target and have a much higher chance of success without needing credentials

It would be a dream for the infiltration hackers to have everyone self host. Unpatched and miscondigured systems would be everywhere and LLM automation could make mass scanning them and exploiting them very attractive - not mass scanning and exploiting them for credentials stealing, no! For layer 2 stuff

None of my customers / clients / coworkers have ever used Azure and "nicer to use" in the same sentence.

A moron could build a better UX and DevX.

It’s the same thing: let’s say Microsoft or AWS got hacked. Then you’re definitely not the only one who got hacked.

So, you can always say: Look, it’s not us (especially not my org!). It f’ing Microsoft/AWS! Everyone got hacked.

You and your career are gonna be just fine.

With a lot of PaaS type vendors you are effectively exposed to both the vendor themselves and the public cloud they run their stack on top of.

Broadly I think you're much more likely to be the victim of a platform-level breach involving an immature startup PaaS than a hyperscaler cloud, however I think for small teams the alternate risk you take on is that AWS/GCP/Azure are full of landmines and extremely easy to misconfigure in insecure ways if you don't know what you're doing. Especially if you have AI telling you confidently wrong things.

When I was at Microsoft we took security cripplingly seriously to the point we could not deliver features and our competitors could because the security process was convoluted and had multiple reviews and approval steps.

Unquestionably. They have top tier security operations that are well funded. They follow (or set) security best practices, they are audited, and they fix them quicker than you can. They have inside industry knowledge that is only shared among top organizations in this space, including government cyber ops. This gives them the ability to fix things before they are even publicly known.

You can get close if you have either:

1. the ability to spend hundreds of millions on security operations yourself

or 2. the ability to airgap the systems you are securing

> nobody ever got fired

thats the crux; are you working for the paycheck, or for the truth?

could be both, but pretty much all "i was right" stories start with "everyone else said i was wrong"

Yes and no. They (or anybody else) are not guaranteed to be secure, of course; see all the compromises regularly found in cloud providers; Azure especially has had so many cross-tenant vulnerabilities (there’s one on the front page right now!) that I’m amazed the concept of public multi-tenant clouds still exists.

But they are also very highly incentivized to be more secure. They have millions of customers (hence a correspondingly higher expectation of trust) and billions in revenue from the trillions in economic activity happening on those platforms (hence a correspondingly larger target on their backs.) This means exponentially higher liabilities. And that probably matters more than any other factor.

People have been breaking in to hosting companies to steal bulk secrets since long before there were inference tokens to steal; the modal attack probably targets database DSNs.

They aren't immune, but they almost universally have better security posture than any alternatives.

https://blog.railway.com/p/preliminary-report-october-securi...

This will be the downfall of the torrent protocol. If you think governments (US and China) are going to tolerate people downloading copyrighted games, movies and music without paying the rightsholder, I have a datacenter to sell you.

If you look at the numbers for revenue at the hyperscalers right now this move doesnt seem significant.

It buys you time. I had my Anthropic key on Northflank set as an env var as-is and only found out about the incident from the HN front page 6 hours later (I didn't even get an email).

I rushed to the Claude platform console and was expecting to see a 4 figure usage bill or something. Luckily there was no usage.

But imagine if I were traveling. Even a rot13 of the key would've bought me enough time to rotate.

2 lessons:

- don't name your env var "CLAUDE_API_KEY". Call it "ARG_1" or something

- at least do some obscurin' so that the value doesn't start with "sk-ant..."

At this point, I kinda feel like the obscurity is our best mechanism for mitigation :(

Give it about a week until AI agents add his "tip" to their training...

That's interesting but if the Azure hypervisor on the server hosting the VM is off limits then it's kind of false sense of security. They protect the key via a sidecar AMD SEV-SNP VM, and if you can't break into the hypervisor, sure, there might be an attack that doesn't involve doing that and only doing lateral movement, but an actual attacker isn't going to respect that boundary.

Or env1 is the key to decrypt env2

If its a targeted attack, they'll know and probably "crack" it. If its just data trawling, you might get owned one day if they bother, but likely the env `AWS_KEY=encrypted_abc` looks reasonably close to `AWS_KEY=unencrypted_abc` and any API key probing will just look like it got rotated already.

I think siblings are correct that the more widespread this is, the less effective once every dump is run through a "also look for keys in the binary" step.

Isn't Linode pretty darn close? IaaS/PaaS provider. Sure it's not one of the Big Three but that is it's role.

there is hypothetically impossible and practically impossible

if AI tools get good enough that they can exploit ingrained hardware properties such as subtle timing and race conditions and swarms off them become cheap enough to deploy so that they can persistently exploit low probability events we could reach a state where I think it's actually practically impossible.

> There is zero reason to suggest security is impossible.

One reason: There is zero reason to suggest security is possible.

Nice data, and also curious whether the blog post was written by AI as well?

"Product Hunt has also said the quiet part out loud."

oops … sorry!

I noticed these and have now become blind to these

"amount" it says. No matter the context, there could be more than you expect.

That they get front page by being breached and me never having heard of them in my own bubble? Yes.

> and in the meantime you can secure software.

... in fantasy land.

It will be impossible to any startup or open source software to grow in such a hostile environment. Anything you put on internet will be attacked by automatic tools with the capabilities of a black hat savant. But unlike hackers that do it for clout and money, a billion parallel agents will hack any random small site just because it’s their prompt.

Okay, cool. Now, tell me how I get access to the frontier models that the attackers use?

Good point, there are of course different levels.

I was thinking of a fully private deployed within the customers cloud account connected to the software provider via Private Service Connect or PrivateLink and then either only available inside the customers private network or only via their own firewall. The point being that it's not publicly exposed.

I was thinking the same thing on security-through-obscurity.

a hacker might know how to hack your service, but they'd have to find it first.

I think the ultimate fallout will be that software "engineers" will finally have to become "engineers" in the real sense, i.e. professionally licensed and personally responsible for the designs they approve and the software they build, whether the actual code is produced by LLMs or humans.

As costs and broader economic impact and perhaps even injuries/deaths related to software breaches continue to grow, there will be growing intolerace for vulnerable software, just as there was intolerance for collapsing bridges and buildings.

And I'd also at some point expect something like a "building code" that applies to software that will be exposed to the public.

Nope. The solution is to move even faster and thus break less things via AI.

I had this exact thought yesterday. Shouldn't AI obliterate PaaS platforms like this one since it's super easy to build a bespoke CI/CD process now? Since it's bespoke, you can lock it down as much as you want. Attackers don't even know it's there. It's time to go back to `deploy.sh` and a VPS.

platforms are better placed to guard against attackers

if you're still doing that manually in 2026 you probably should not be self hosting anything of consequence or commercial liability

Yeah IIRC calif research on php2shell preceded all of that but I still stand by the thought that Anthropic has been the most accelerationist AI company despite its lip service to the notion of safety.

They are using mythos-5.5, which is still better than an abliterated GLM-5.3.