When you write your blog post with claude, I start hitting these phrases and then start only skimming and looking for them, and stop reading what you have to write.
I Found a $90k Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google (simonkoeck.com)
dualvariable 2 hours ago
x______________ 2 hours ago
I've spotted a few memes about this and can admit to doing the same..
ai;dr
(tl;dr, evolved)
phoghed 2 hours ago
birdsongs an hour ago
I have a backlog of books written by humans I'd much rather spend my time on.
But I love a good handwritten tech article.
shoebilyas_hanz 23 minutes ago
option_greek 4 hours ago
dec0dedab0de 4 hours ago
bitpush 4 hours ago
We can put in systems in place to catch bugs. And that's the system that's working here.
Now to the second part of the question -
How did they not catch it before? If it were "easy", it would not have been worth 90k, and hindsight is 20/20 - once you know where to look for, it is all very very obvious.
Cpoll 2 hours ago
> Normal Google Applications (T2), S0 RCE: $75,000 base × 1.2 for exceptional report quality.
"Easy" isn't a factor in calculating the bounty.
hmokiguess 3 hours ago
when the "give a shit quotient" of the employee moves towards "highly engaged with the organization and its mission" to "this is just a job, I'm gonna rest and vest"
throwawayffffas an hour ago
stonyrubbish 8 hours ago
elevation 5 hours ago
We're probably at the end of the era of these kinds of big payouts. AI tools will drive the going rates to approximately the costs of the tokens. Bounties exist to make it nominally more economical for researchers to report exploits than it is to resell them.
Gander5739 5 hours ago
Is this really true? After all, reselling the exploit would be illegal, and most people don't want to break the law to earn income.
jack_pp 4 hours ago
mapontosevenths 4 hours ago
Cyber companies are in the fortune 100 now, and it's not like it used to be back when you actually had to be interested in it and dedicate your life to learning the skillz from shady forums. Now it's just a job to most practitioners.
jack_pp 4 hours ago
IrishTechie 3 hours ago
mapontosevenths 2 hours ago
On the other hand, if the value of that drops you can expect to see some folks start taking the wrong path.
saagarjha 2 hours ago
micromacrofoot 4 hours ago
graemep 4 hours ago
tptacek 4 hours ago
In reality, the modal benefit accruing to a company running a bounty program on receipt of a new serious vulnerability is simply engineering prioritization. You get bug reports from users when you have reliability and UX bugs, but you don't get them for security flaws, because attackers generally have to force vulnerabilities into revealing themselves --- normal users almost never run into them. Bug bounty programs fill that gap.
ofjcihen 3 hours ago
If you’re saying that bug bounties exist for a reason according to both the program runners and the contributors then how is that not the reason they exist?
The people paying and the people working are all in agreement that it exists for that reason.
tptacek 2 hours ago
ofjcihen an hour ago
I detailed my logic above.
Additionally, part of my businesses remediation services include helping companies set up bug bounty programs. Giving researchers an incentive to report bugs for payouts instead of selling or exploiting them for profits is always the intended goal.
tptacek an hour ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025038
It's the product of direct interviews with bounty people, FAANG/MAG7 blue teamers, and black market participants. If you want more, there's also an interview online that we did with Mark Dowd, who is one of the best known CNE vendors to the NATO IC. You can just Google [SCW Mark Dowd].
I'm happy to go into more detail, but, like I said, you didn't really respond to my comment in any way that I could expand on. Feel free to disagree with me in some kind of specific way.
This really is simple: if you work in this space, you already know that there's essentially no black market at all for serverside web bugs. But there's a $90k bounty for this one, and 5-figure bounties for others. Reconcile those two facts.
ofjcihen 39 minutes ago
What a vulnerability sells for and how much damage someone could do exploiting it are two different things. Someone capable of finding a serious vulnerability is probably capable of exploiting it themselves. They don’t need a buyer.
A company paying big bucks isn’t a contradiction. Its incentivizing disclosure over exploitation which could cost them considerably more. Engineering prioritization is… a minor part of it informed by the ease of exploitation, damage it could do (in the case of an RCE or publicly available keys as in this case quite a bit) etc.
I don’t see why you think these things are mutualy exclusive.
kasey_junk 28 minutes ago
I’m not in the security industry but that strains credulity.
ofjcihen 21 minutes ago
The point is that bounties create an incentive to find and disclose vulns. That doesn’t require a black market for the exploits.
kasey_junk 18 minutes ago
I’m responding to this. I would assume the list of people able to find a vulnerability is much much greater than the number of people willing to do a one off heist with it.
ofjcihen 14 minutes ago
nicce 4 hours ago
j45 5 hours ago
Quitschquat 2 hours ago
What a bargain
EdwardDiego 12 hours ago
Oh, maybe that's why "Claude" was substituted with "I", because Claude wrote this blog post from a first person perspective.
pestatije 11 hours ago
throwaway260124 8 hours ago
Research taste, among other things are still abilities that differentiate among humans.
In fact, I expect the elimination of other limiting factors by AI to lead to those becoming more important. By the same mechanism that make ugly hedge fund managers more performant.
The problem then is that composition of the top performers will change. Which is problematic since being a top performer ( ‘artist’, ‘researcher’, ‘writer’,..) is often an identity which ‘we often create to protect ourselves: the strong one who never breaks, the intelligent one who is always certain... The mask that once protected you can eventually become the cage that prevents you from changing’
devin 6 hours ago
tomrod 6 hours ago
devin 4 hours ago
tomrod 4 hours ago
You can hardly blame anyone for avoiding a clickthrough into an auth-walled, user-hostile site to read the point the headline made in an attempt to "gotcha"
nullpoint420 6 hours ago
I do have to send input to the thing to get a response, no?
AnotherGoodName 6 hours ago
No thank you says pretty much everyone.
hxugufjfjf 3 hours ago
xnorswap 7 hours ago
cyanydeez 7 hours ago
I agree effort and prior knowledge are required, but a few magic words is like 80% of the effort.
mindcrime 7 hours ago
ctvo 3 hours ago
This is the typical "ugh that's just rsync" when Dropbox was announced, but for a new LLM age.
_If it's so easy, do it_. Don't post about it. Do it. Fix these bugs at scale. Charge people money for it once you've built up a reputation. Get your own bug bounties.
fishgoesblub 6 hours ago
sva_ 7 hours ago
sumeno 6 hours ago
jchw 6 hours ago
wy1981 7 hours ago
I also am wondering if Claude will proceed on a prompt which is about finding a bug like that? I am not sure, has anyone tried?
jchw 6 hours ago
lgats 6 hours ago
The cookie contained a pickle-serialized payload, "which was bad enough on its own." maybe not best practice but not bad on it's own
Flask session cookies are signed", not encrypted," so the... LLMs love to tell you what things aren't, as an emphasis on what they are
mpeg an hour ago
Pickle payload is a red flag precisely because pickle is not a safe serialisation format format when taken as untrusted input, here the input was trusted but it's still giving someone en easy escalation path (exactly what happened)
And most people would assume the whole cookie payload would be encrypted if they saw just a binary blob, and not realise you can fully read it if it's just signed
But, yes, the post was probably edited by an LLM, as is pretty much everything else you read online these days.
giancarlostoro 6 hours ago
;)
snypher 6 hours ago
Same old tired complaining about people not using technology correctly, or the way a _real_ coder would do it.
psychoslave 6 hours ago
Gander5739 6 hours ago
prettyblocks 6 hours ago
pluto_modadic 6 hours ago
taytus 6 hours ago
mpeg an hour ago
nerder92 2 hours ago
iJohnDoe 5 hours ago
consumer451 6 hours ago
"Claude did this, not you" - does that mean that humans have no agency at all when they use an LLM? Is that the argument?
Maybe the norm should be to credit the LLM and harness used, like "I used ___ to help me find an RCE", but I can see arguments not to do that in some cases.
edit: The giant thread with this now got flagged, so some users may not see it.
causal 6 hours ago
But it needs a disclosure if Claude was used: "The cookie is what caught my eye" - if that was actually Claude's eye then yeah, Simon is claiming to have a keen eye that he in fact does not.
"Claude found a $90K RCE" would have been just as interesting if not more.
brookst 5 hours ago
It is fair an interesting to disclose tools used, but I am with GP in leaving agency with humans, at least for now.
jchw 5 hours ago
If I post an image and I say, "I drew this", and someone says, "no you didn't. That is clearly output from Qwen Image 2.1", can I reply, "Qwen Image 2.1 is just a tool, like Photoshop"? I mean, I can, but if I do this, I am missing the point. The point is that I didn't draw anything. I didn't draw. I didn't draw digitally. I didn't draw analog. I didn't draw with my mind. I typed a prompt. This is as close to drawing as photography is to drawing.
So did this person actually find a vulnerability on their own? Hell if I know, but I take issue with LLM-authored blog posts; I don't trust people who post LLM-authored blog posts as if they were written by themselves to be honest about the nature of their work.
If you really are still doing work and understanding and just using LLMs as a tool, show your understanding in your blog post that you are communicating to the world, instead of having Claude or GPT show its understanding. I don't really care whether you used Claude and didn't list it, if it's clear as day you understand what you were doing with it.
I'm dying on this hill. Until HN bans this sort of blog post or bans all of us complaining, these comments are going to be very, very boring. And I am stubborn for longer than most people can stand to read the same comments. Believe me.
hnaccount_rng 4 hours ago
We can discuss the quality of the offering. But that’s a different discussion
jchw 3 hours ago
Drawing with Photoshop absolutely resembles drawing. Photobashing with Photoshop does not. Photography also isn't drawing. These things are all distinct. That's the actual point I was trying to get at here by invoking Photoshop. Image models differ from text in that text models do resemble something closer to what people are actually doing, but you just have to accept that analogies have limitations here. Just like you can draw or not draw with Photoshop, you can use Claude in ways where you're really driving it like a tool to do work, and you can also use Claude in a "fix the bug" sense where you're doing absolutely nothing other than paying $200/mo and typing occasionally.
But whereas Photoshop introduces nuance to what it means to draw or make art by introducing different levels of involvement versus remixing and etc., Claude and Stable Diffusion utterly decimate nuance in a thermonuclear blast that plunges us into a nuance Nuclear Winter, by offering for perhaps the first time a way for the computer to do nearly all of the generalized "thinking" while you sit on your ass and argue on HN. (Reminder for everyone to check on their agents.)
Trust me, I use LLMs, I get the idea. I can "vibe code". On my workbench is a laptop running an entire desktop system including an application suite that I really didn't write. It would be cool to go online and say "Hey guys check out this cool desktop environment I wrote!" but I won't because I really didn't. It was just an experiment. Did I put in effort? Yes. Was it coding? Nope, it was closer to management, though I did write some code. The experiment was some mix of failure and success, but what I would never do is say that I wrote it. I may some day blog about the experience and the pros and cons and how I feel about the resulting code, but for right now I feel the Internet is full of enough slop and most people who I respect are thoroughly tired of hearing about LLMs all day (I am too at this point, though I am not saying I find none of it interesting.)
Do I think all LLM use absolutely must be disclosed? Actually no, and especially right now I understand why some people don't. I know I just said LLMs and diffusion models destroy all nuance, but that's not strictly true. My line in the sand is this: if nobody can tell overtly that you're using LLMs, and you can demonstrate your own understanding of what you are doing, then I don't care. In that case it's more of a concern for the person using the LLM, because the real concern in that case is becoming dependent on LLMs and being unable to write software/etc. without them anymore. But that isn't really my concern.
If I can tell your blog post was written by Claude within the first few sentences you have completely failed to demonstrate anything but your willingness to deceive people. How can you not feel some shame putting yourself on the By-line of a blog post you didn't write? I mean it's written in first person! And I know damn well that not everyone can immediately pick out LLM-generated text, but that isn't entirely the point either. It's one thing to use LLMs to do work, but the point of a blog post isn't just the text, blogging is a form of (formerly...) human expression. It just doesn't make any sense to put Claude-slop blog posts right next to human-authored blog posts, any more than it makes sense to put AI-generated images next to drawings. The point isn't the pixels and isn't the words. That contrasts with code, because with code, the point really is the code, and other stuff is secondary.
I can't tell you whether this person found this vulnerability and triaged it or Claude did. I don't even care. However, I don't trust a blog post they didn't write anyway.
This is a long comment, but it's hard to make it shorter. LLMs and diffusion models are not comparable to tools like Photoshop, in a way that is more extreme than the difference between Photoshop and a pencil. Analogies are nice (limited) shortcuts that can help us reason about things, but in this case analogies alone are insufficient because we are dealing with something that has a brand new shape.
logicchains 6 hours ago
j45 5 hours ago
freecodeio 4 hours ago
j45 3 hours ago
Yet, they are being used with endless surprise as non-deterministic layers of abstraction on top of deterministic compilers.
My point is to use a technology for what it is capable for (where capabilities are discovered weekly and hard to keep up with), not trying to get it to do everything.
Bringing a deterministic lens to non-deterministic software has its dangers too. Non-deterministic software seems to be its own category of software, increasingly capable of non-deterministic approaches that deterministic compilers software couldn’t attempt.
Maybe that’s less compilers and more different type of scaffolding of vectors.
I’m all for skepticism, the issue with cynicism is capabilities often pass those perspectives by sometimes too quickly.
oooyay 5 hours ago
I suspect a lot of things fall into the latter. It is a common neg to defer everything to the former though.
freecodeio 5 hours ago
shitter 33 minutes ago
shoebilyas_hanz 22 minutes ago