> LLM assisted attacks solve

Yes, LLMs can easily knock over your on-prem docker appliances.

But you can still put stuff out of reach. I'm currently designing a key on-prem appliance that is can be compiled down to transistors, giving deterministic wire-speed performance while ruling out RCEs. It's cryptographically homomorphic: it processes authorized inputs but doesn't know what they mean, so an attacker who obtains the disk doesn't benefit either. The design will be highly resistant to exploits, and is likely to remain outside the "next-token" prediction training set.

This is the kind of thing AWS won't sit down and engineer for you. But thanks to LLMs I finally have the time.

You’re technically right, which is the best type of right, but my point is the fragmentation and lower reward will make discovery harder, and the value of searching and cracking less worth the effort.

I had a html game I built for my niece on railway with an open ai API key so she could vibe code changes. No hacker would have looked for it but now I am catching strays because railway was a juicy target. Hyper scalers would be the same. Some random colo not so much.

No self-service sign up for your app. No public access to the app itself. Website that let's you submit a sign up request form. Team reaches out and reviews your request, creates an account in the app dash for you, and you set up mTLS to get access to the dash.

It's much easier to protect yourself if you have your infra behind a perimeter firewall you control.

For one, I have strict iptable rules to drop inbound from outside my specific commercial subnet and my specific residential IP. After that, all the usual best practices.

Breaking a lock still costs approximately the same, whether the lock is protecting a small barn or a huge hangar. A large number of small but reasonably tough (not unbreakable) targets makes the payoff per target smaller. This necessitates target selection, and chances of being deliberately skipped grow for an average target.

Let them laugh. Self hosting is much easier with OSS that solves most of the pain that made the cloud transition worth it, and commodity hardware has been cheap and capable for over a decade.

My company just did this. Still using AWS S3 but everything else is on-prem with kubernetes.

> For consumers <snip> self-host things.

That's not how consumers work. That's a nerd/geek/hobbyist mentality.

If Ikea and Wayfair went out of business you wouldn't expect consumers too take up woodworking and build their own furniture en masse.

For consumers/small orgs, how is the security at a cheap VPS provider going to be any better than at a cheap IaaS provider?

If you have to hack 1,000,000 custom setups to get the same results as one hyperscaler, would you bother?

and it wasn't what he was saying, the "nicer to use" in the context were startup IaaS alternatives

I have a bridge to sell you if you think everyone on the Azure team is sub-moron. Infra security is a hard problem to solve, GCP and AWS don't quite have a perfect track record either, perhaps AWS stands out as a better option but it's hard to argue about it.

In a prior role, we realized something similar with outages. For our particular product, we AWS went down - we went down. We freaked out the first time, but after it was done we realized not a single customer had inquired. This felt unusual since we were getting emails quickly if we have a self-inflicted outage.

Turns out, when a major provider went down all of our users were too busy fighting their own fires. When they do notice, it's on a day when ALL of their vendors are struggling so we don't get singled out as a bad apple.

The whole "No one gets fired for using IBM" analogy.

It's today's "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". You're really just want the the SLA (someone to blame when things inevitably fail)

This is especially true if the majority of your customers are also on Microsoft/AWS/etc.

Literally 0 of your customers will notice that you are down if their own systems are also not working.

This is perfectly valid for many businesses, up to a (shockingly high) level.

Yeah, if Exchange goes down, you get a day off. If the little boutique email provider you chose goes offline, you get a day in calls with everyone yelling at you.

If you need deniability, sure.

But it you actually NEED security, it's clearly not an option.

You are just describing how they're a more valuable target for an attack.

Having crippling bureaucracy does not correlate with good security outcomes, except maybe negatively. However, having a history of unending egregious security failures, like Microsoft, does correlate with poor security outcomes. For that matter, having a present of unending egregious security failures also correlates with poor security outcomes.

Let us look on the front page and see if there are any, oh look here is one: https://www.binarysecurity.no/posts/2026/10/one-root-case

Practically every software security firm in the country was a vendor to Microsoft in the mid-late oughts and I know the Microsoft you're speaking about, but the vibe I've got lately is that things are different there now.

Tell me you weren’t on the Windows team without telling me you weren’t on the windows team :)

For me, the truth. I’d like the most secure provider possible. Which one is it though?

[dead]

Adding on to it, even though they may be using AI as well. This could very well be a placebo and deniability factor but the fact remains that they have many many qualified employees and the chances of bugs passing through that are much less compared to other systems. Also it's that the systems are very severely pen-tested and have years of bugs removed out and the incentive of billions of dollars at stake that you mention that they have for the trust premium.

They will still make mistakes but they have the resources to make them less.

I doubt that such intense level of thorough testing can occur in a smaller company.

I still love small VPS providers and use them myself but it is worth knowing why enterprise is willing to pay a premium over those to these hyperscalers (it is a trust premium)

I have told you before not to contact me, although you have flagged my previous comments to conceal this fact. This is, I think, the seventh time. I have lost count. Do not "forget" again.

Oh boy.

“malicious actor had access to abliterated models and substantial compute resources which enabled them to perform highly sophisticated exploits against our infrastructure.”

They don’t provide any details but pass it off as an advanced AI attack. I’m going to just read that as what it is. A likely scapegoat for shitty security.

Pirated content can run on a $20 computer.

SOTA open models need tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware to run.

I get your analogy, and it feels right, but the compute requirements to run these models are extreme. That analogy falls apart when it necessitates having a corporate 3rd party run the models for you. They will not tolerate breaking laws.

If China says no more, then the best the masses are gonna get on their high-end setups are the 30B class models. Which are decent, but not "hack my bank", errr, "protect our bank" decent.

Piracy flourished because you only need an operating laptop to participate. LLMs you need a server rack of GPUs to participate.