One argument for LLMs is that although all information on topics X, Y and Z was already available somewhere, LLMs make that information more exploitable through collation, filtering and dynamic tailoring.

For a relatively narrow subject area (e.g. construction of pipe bombs) the collation is minimal, and so the filtering and tailoring probably isn't that important; a novice doesn't learn a lot more from the LLM than they would have done from a few Google searches.

For a broad subject (practical creation and exploitation of software vulnerabilities), the collation is very significant and the filtering means that LLMs can empower a novice to act at a similar level as an expert.

> That information is easily available other places

Often ease of access in the moment is all that matters. If there's a gun nearby you might shoot someone or yourself in a heated argument, but are less likely to go and find/buy one to use. Someone who's stopped from attempting a suicide will likely not try again (70%)

A bored/depressed/angry/curious person might try to build a pipe bomb if they can find out how easily, but are less likely to put in effort.

There used to be a thing called "Moore's Law of Mad Science":

"Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."

Nowadays it is dropping much faster. At a certain point, the de-facto IQ needed to destroy the world will be low enough that someone can do it while they're having a psychotic break. There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?

This is because to build a pipe bomb you need difficult to source materials. This is not the case for other types of threats (cyber / bio).

I personally have no need for an LLM which will readily explain how to cut up the genotype of smallpox into small chunks which can pass the screening at the bio-labs, and can be readily assembled into the real thing by a second year lab-student.

> The anarchist cookbook has been around and available for 55 years, and yet pipe bombs are not going off all around us.

That cookbook has been linked to several attacks and used in multiple prosecutions [1], therefore contradicting your point.

In the mid 90s in high school, people I knew were building articles such as the one you mention, using the cookbook. Fortunately they have all their hands still.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook

I think this was just intended as universally obvious proof the filters were disabled, while not actually giving an example not commonly known.

this is because of perception Bias. people working in fields where crime or violence is the day to day think everyone is a violent criminal, so if things like this become available thing the world will end and everyone will kill eachother. Reality however will be different, because in reality most people do not want to harm another. This has been proven by many studies, that is not a common thing for people to be evil or harmful, but this is hard to recognise is every day is filled with crime and violence.

LLMs will not kill security, it will change. just like handheld high explosives likely changed a deal too somewhere somehow.

Not entirely unlike XKCD 1958 [0]. "I guess it's just that most people aren't murderers"

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1958/

Because it's a risk most people intuitively understand, but most of them also don't know how difficult it is to "build a bomb" or "make a bioweapon".

In reality, the skills needed are pretty basic, but they overlap pretty strongly with being sane and well-adjusted. And if you are, you're probably not daydreaming about mass murder. Exceptions happen, Unabomber and so on, but they're pretty rare. In any case, Unabomber probably didn't need a tutorial.

We don't want ChatGPT to become an enabler and a co-conspirator for an unhinged person, but I think the concern is overdone.

It might be an acessability issue.

If you already have a magic interface, which helps you pro activly in responding to everything uncensored because you feel like 'observered' or whatever and then you spiral in a whole and that one partner encourages you and gives you helpful steps to do anything.

But i'm more worried that the internet gets a lot less save with uncensored frontier LLMs.

pipe bombs attached to consumer drones will be a big issue. I predict drones will become illegal for the private sector within the following years.

The difference is memory bandwidth. The M5 Ultra that's coming out on 22nd September can do 1,200GB/s. The M5 Max you can buy today only has 614GB/s.

Also, LLMs never *write* code snippets, they just pirate them from somewhere else.

The author put in the numbers, but maybe you didn’t read them.

45 t/s a second is perfectly respectable especially with no limits and 24/7 uptime with very little power draw on the Studio.

Luna is at around 100 t/s for comparison, but it’s a worse model than 5.3 Flash

A large number of places will buy a new firewall every 5 years, or pay their fortinet renewal and check "Security: Done!" without any kind of analysis.

I was contracted in to a place to do among other things cyber security insurance audits, and they asked me to stop doing them because I refused to lie to their insurer. "Wait but if we only score 20 / 300 that makes us look kind of bad" uh huh.

The "surprisingly secure" WordPress just had a unauthenticated RCE earlier this year. Just simplifying isn't going to be enough.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-63030

The reason is simple - nothing really bad has happened that we can point at and say "ah, shit, let's all learn collectively". I know it sounds naive when I say it, but there hasn't been a significantly consequential hack, leak, destruction, or anything related to cybersecurity where it led for concerns of people.

The main thing I can think of is cyber insurance, which requires a bunch of audits, and some checks maybe, and it changes some conditions whenever there's a big explosion. Whenever big leaks happened, data security and etc., nobody really went to jail, so nobody really cares. Everything can be brushed off, because it costs time to implement proper measures and adds friction / barriers in some cases. So in the end, there's a huge pushback against it. And I totally get it, to be honest.

Static sites all the way (hugo, jekyll, mkdocs!). No one needs wordpress. There's even Sveltia or DecapCMS now, to give those WYSIWYG-people access to static site editing. Then, remove PHP and all the dependency overhead and attack surface and you have a stripped down nginx that is pretty simple, minimalistic and bulletproof.

> as a first step, simplify everything, and make sure you're aware how your stack works, and what it imports.

We've been trying that for years but the enthusiasm of developers and the eagerness of their employers fight against it. Worse, with coding LLMs it's now easier than ever to output a lot of code, fast.

It'll ultimately be up to more experienced developers to salvage these projects. Or not, given that the coding LLMs aren't stopping and will likely get better over time. Either way, we will need experienced people that know what to look out for / know how to instruct LLMs to output secure code and find weaknesses etc.

> We need a new KISS: keep it simple, stupid, secure.

Maybe KISSASS: "keep it simple, stupid! also secure, stupid!"

Minimization of 3rd party dependencies has always been a key for risk reduction. Now more than ever before.

Some stacks make this a lot easier than others. I regret the rules of HN effectively forbid this conversation because it has meaningful technical consequences and isn't purely about ideological flame war.

The problem is that lots of people don't want a CMS, they want a platform for development / e-commerce / bookings / whatever. Enforcing vanilla WordPress would push people towards other platforms. Now that could be a good thing, but I doubt WordPress are going to start killing their own marketshare with usage restrictions like that...

Probably nine out of ten Wordpress sites do not need active content. Why are we not rendering static copies and serving them to customers?

This is not at all easy though. Most Wordpress users are not software companies. They contract some work out to set it up, maybe some recurring maintenance but they don’t have in house development experience.

If they have a site existing today built on plugins and a theme, how are they realistically going to simplify this? How would they even know they need to without the site being hacked?

Wordpress without any plugins is kinda useless. Best to completely avoid using it, there are better options

More and more people everyday become convinced, mostly because of AI take sellers/grifters, that needing to understand your stack is unnecessary. This problem is about to get way worse.

Can confirm.

I work at an e-commerce agency where we work with (among others) Adobe Commerce.

The number of unauthorized RCE vulnerabilities being reported not only in the core product, but also very popular modules used in the community[1] is going through the roof.

And we are having a lot of close calls, too; just last weekend, a 0day[2] was widely being exploited at a large scale, before any publication or patch. We have learnt to be on the ball with applying patches and security updates, and even with all that effort, we saw a few projects already being hit by the initial log poisoning. We got lucky that nothing was fully compromised but I am sure that many, many webshops got infected last weekend. And not even a day later there are already other variants of this exploit showing up.

[1] https://sansec.io/research/amasty-mass-disclosure

[2] https://sansec.io/research/stylesmuggler-0day

I've ran simple prompts such as "Do a in-depth sweep of this (private) repo and find any security flaws" for a few dozen long-running apps and websites that I have access to. Every single one came back with multiple real vulnerabilities within 5 or 10 minutes.

Even if they are good the vulnerabilities have to be there. There's lots of things turning up like Local Privilege Escalations (LPE) in Linux, but serious people didn't expect the kernel to be a boundary for a sophisticated attacker.

A lot of the vulnerabilities LLMs are finding now are the "long tail" and affect only particular configurations, I would be surprised if e.g. a widely applicable RCE is found in Linux (but I'm also not going to bet against it).

Where this gets interesting is the long tail can be used to target a particular system and this is where defense-in-depth becomes important for every organisation.

I guess the year mark is when things go from bad to worse? Instead of the financially motivated groups currently doing their work, it ends up being random people being able to say "Hack my ex's website" to a box they just bought and ran a program they downloaded onto it.

Thankfully we have already made good progress towards things like arm memory tagging and memory safe languages.

It’s a rocky period right now but the future will be much more secure after all the low hanging fruit are found.

Being cautious is a good thing, but these models can also do some good. And if they run with simpler HW, it could allow all sorts of new consumer thingies. I mean, the world will not come to end in the coming year.

The point of the local model in the context of the article was to argue that you can't ban these capabilities.

Making datacenters and public clouds only rent GPUs to a restricted list of people, while tightly monitoring what people do with their bought resources won't help.

> What is it? Can it be this autonomous terrifying entity or can it not be?

the difference between attack and defense is that attacks can be throwaway code. it's much easier to let an llm hack out a prototype than to get it to build maintainable code that people want to read and review. it's not enough to get Daybreak or Mythos to write you a patch, you need the author of the project to accept and merge it.

Since 1945? Friend, this has been the case since the invention of the pointy stick.

I think the author's point is that open weight models aren't going to be locked down like that.

And even if they are locked down, it's hours between a model being released on huggingface and an "abliterated" variant that has most of its security features removed is uploaded.

[delayed]

It's a good time to reduce the reliance on technology.

Throw out the IoT and "smart" stuff from your home. Remove apps from your phone and leave the absolute basics. Go through the password manager and close accounts for sites you are no longer using. Start migrating off Google. Print out your most precious photos on paper. And so on :-)

Meanwhile a huge portion of management and leadership in software companies are encouraging everyone to de facto stop looking at code and let the LLM and a bunch of boundaries handle this for you.

I wonder why C and C++ are usually regarded as equally insecure. In C you need to carefully check that you free allocated memory, and that you don't use it after you free it. In C++ this is automated by using classes like std::string and std::vector, once they go out of scope their memory is freed and you can't use it anymore. It is still possible, e.g. by using a for loop that iterates over a vector, and removing or adding stuff to that same vector in that loop. But my rough estimate is that such errors are at least ten times less likely in C++.

I develop in C++ for a job, and when I need to use a library written in C I always have a bad feeling about it.

A lot, I am only writing C or C++ for new code when it is unavoidable, like existing code bases, bindings or tinkering with runtime implementations that aren't bootstraped.

Mobile platforms, distributed computing have long moved the spotligh away from C and C++, other than language runtimes or existing products from the 90's like SQL servers, and naturally UNIX like underlying OS, which most userspace developers aren't writing new code for.

Naturally there are domains like LLVM/GCC, console game dev, HPC/HFT where they are unavoidable for new code.

That’s fine for your home server, but if you want an actual server that the general public can use, it has to be exposed to the internet.

So how do you expose your legitimate service on the Internet?

Got any leads on good tutorials on how to use a microkernel operating system on a VPS somewhere to host a website?

"throw away all software written before 2026" does technically solve this problem, if you ignore everything else the article is talking about (deployment and continuity of service)