What’s getting pwned right now (pwn.watch)

378 pointsby mrkd3 days ago172 comments

demibabs 3 days ago

Every ai generated page tries to cram way too much information in way too small a place

dawnerd 3 days ago

And also just useless or confusing information like the box labeled closed that has “Ongoing” inside.

darknavi 3 days ago

Definitely. And often repeated/redundant information in many cases.

thekitze 3 days ago

someone called it "narrative ui", usually opus and deepseek dont do it as much, this was grok bot cleaning up now

thekitze 3 days ago

i know, it's pissing me off too. fixing now!

demibabs 3 days ago

Kudos on improving it; it’s definitely better now.

(But still not great, evidenced by the fact that most of the upvotes on my comment are from after you improved it.)

etatester 3 days ago

I'm ok with that. Better than those 2007 iPhone bare pages where you can't do or read anything.

What I don't like is that every site now looks the same.

lifeisloving 3 days ago

Im not, its like everyone is using the same font/color/layout. Like they dont even take a second to change the generic color palette all these llms output.

These styles only change after a model gets updated, then they all start having a different font, some cursive red font and a beige background maybe.

I knew what this site was going to look like before I clicked the link.

Its so ugly and unoriginal, I assume the content/information trying to be communicated lacks any sort of expertise or original insights.

Yesterday these topics went viral and this guy used some llm to farm engagement. It was literally built to get attention for a singular day after this topic went viral. It will not exist in 3 months.

Edit. Its actually an attempt to bandwagon jump ontp a viral topic and sell $150 ad spots and probably to promote their own $299 club for vibecoders.

letrix 2 days ago

I found that if you make the base styling and components, and then vibecode the layout/content, you get better results than letting the LLM make the base itself.

Obviously if your base is just unmodified shadcn, then it will look like any other toy site out there.

poilcn 2 days ago

Had same vibe with bootstrap, material design before

lenkite a day ago

Seriously - why can't the browsers just natively support a common UI component framework. Its 2026 and they still haven't done it. That old excuse of: webtech needs individual flair and diversity is now a fraudulent argument considering that everyone uses Claude to generate the same look and feel everywhere.

Might as well get it natively supported in the browser.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 3 days ago

My biggest issue is the dark theme, which makes it more or less impossible to consume for people with astigmatism. I looked at the page half a minute ago and my eyes are still trying to recover fully.

dcchambers 3 days ago

My eyes have no idea what to focus on.

It would be more readable if every AI-generated page didn't go for the dark-mode + glowing neon cyber aesthetic.

thekitze 3 days ago

fixed!

kps 2 days ago

Still dark for me (Firefox 158.0 on Linux)

dcchambers 2 days ago

Looks better, thanks. What's the source for this data? Might be nice to declare that somewhere on the page as well.

repeekad 3 days ago

It's also an ad to what seems to be an AI vibe coding community that asks for money

Waterluvian 3 days ago

There's so much potential here. It just takes a human who barely knows what they're doing to sit and make critical decisions about it all. You don't even have to have design experience. Just some common sense about consistency and intent.

stronglikedan 3 days ago

Yup... Love it! Get rekt negative space!

alfirous 2 days ago

Unnecessary information density.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2 days ago

For a command line-only, textmode-only user, e.g., yours truly, "AI" trends can have a silver lining^1

https://pwn.watch/llms.txt

https://pwn.watch/all/feed.xml

https://pwn.watch/incidents.json

Within incidents.json are JSON files for each incident with further details

A user could easily construct their own "web page" (or SQL database, CSV, formatted textfile, etc.) that caters to the user's own aesthetic and functional preferences

I've become accustomed to reading JSON, Markdown, etc. For me these text-only formats are "human readable"

In the text-only browser I use, incidents.json is easier for me to read than the pwn.watch web page

No Javascript, cookies, data collection, surveillance, ads, etc.

1. Also, MCP

aeturnum 3 days ago

I don't understand the categorization for incidents. This signal vulnerability[1] is listed as "Live" and "ongoing" but was patched over a month ago (just announced today). If an incident with no known exploits is "ongoing" 1.5 months after the patch is released, when would it be over?

[1] https://pwn.watch/i/signal-ringrtc-cve-2026-113380

lifeisloving 3 days ago

Because its not a serious site. Its a next day viral piggy-back to promote a $299 club for vibecoders.

pixl97 3 days ago

Would be interesting to see what 2025 looked like in comparison.

The rate at which flaws are being found is just insane. Many people warned us in the past that our lax security postures would come back to bite us, and we're finally here.

Kevin_Flynn 3 days ago

Well, an economist would say, we have as much security as we collectively decided we were willing to pay for.

And theres really only one of 2 outcomes as this progresses as I can see it:

1) The AI's are well matched, and the outcome is balanced, and it ends up being a metric of the internet itself that gets monitored, like this website is doing.

2) It crashes in such a spectacular fashion that important utilities and industries are distrupted, with the length of time for recovery being the determining factor in how many people lose their minds, start looting, etc ... you know the story.

trollbridge 3 days ago

Collectively, billions have been spent on cybersecurity. It was just mostly wasted, that's all.

pixl97 3 days ago

Because we build things the wrong way.

"We take code and make it secure"

instead of

"We take secure and make it code".

That said, maybe it's impossible. Maybe turing completeness and security are antithetical and someone will always be able to find a way to poke a hole in the system from a lower layer of reality.

Kevin_Flynn 3 days ago

"We take secure and make it code".

Yeah, that. Manual controls w/ an optional automation, not just, automation with an optional "oh shit" button.

As for the AI's hacking and patching, one could reason since we are dealing with Turing machines that as long as changes to any given codebase/version cease, then all possible holes and patches would be found given enough attacks for that specific release.

Perhaps unfolding almost exactly like Conways 'Game of Life' with an order or two magnitude more rules and states, where the end pattern for any release is 'stability.'

We need a realtime dashboard for this :D

paganel 3 days ago

> we take secure and make it code

That’s how we got to abominations like two MFA operations in order to login to a basic web interface/web product, no-one sane would have ever paid for that originally.

pixl97 3 days ago

No. That is not what I'm talking about, that is a completely different subject in the topic of security. The problem of identity, which is close to unsolvable itself.

I'm talking about problems at the algorithmic level.

red75prime 3 days ago

Provably correct programs verified for the hardware they are running on are possible (seL4 is one of a few examples). Their development is very time consuming though. There are caveats, but it's possible, in principle, to fully block certain attack vectors (for example, network access). The attackers then should go a more expensive and dangerous human manipulation or physical access route.

ASI (artificial superintelligence), theoretically, can exploit the ultimate analog nature of digital circuits (something like Plundervolt, but more intricate), but if we'd get to this stage when we need to defend against ASI, we'd have bigger problems.

pixl97 3 days ago

>can exploit the ultimate analog nature of digital circuits

I was just giving a very similar reply here on this article.

One of the interesting things science has showed is that 'human' scale is nothing special at all. All kind of complexity exists at scales larger and smaller than us. Up to the point that "humans" are just an emergent phenomenon of a bunch of little tiny things working together. Entire worlds exist beyond our human senses.

And that has me a little bit concerned about the speed at which we're flinging ourselves into the future. I'd rather not invent something and go "oops, no takesies backsies" and do something like kill all security in digital computing and watch the world become completely unhinged.

InsidiousWombat 3 days ago

eh, it was mostly coz of security theathre

browningstreet 3 days ago

In every billion dollar company I've worked at, the infosec team has numbered less than 10 people.

ryandrake 3 days ago

And are entirely focused on compliance and checkboxes rather than whether the systems are actually secure.

UltraSane 3 days ago

Because it was spent on babysitting C pointers instead of actually writing secure software.

juleiie 3 days ago

This will be a real test which societies start looting in such circumstances

I fortunately live in a peaceful, cooperative country of Poland that looks down upon such practices unlike us or France or uk

Let the best win. Over and out

pixl97 3 days ago

Oh, don't worry, when all your European neighbors are busy fighting each other with sticks Russia will come along and start coveting what is yours.

juleiie 3 days ago

Poland and Ukraine will hold the candle of civilisation together against all odds

metrix 3 days ago

This may be a side conversation, but wondered how far away we are to a small LLM being prompted to turn itself into a worm that uses all exploits it knows, and prompts other LLM's when it has access.

pixl97 3 days ago

I've seen this discussed on HN a few times under articles, and is a risk I've seen communicated in AI safety.

I guess it's being called an AI prompt worm. It's not quite to the stage of sovereign AI where the entire model weights are moved with the 'virus', but still presents a pretty big risk.

datsci_est_2015 3 days ago

It’s orders of magnitude easier to destroy something than it is to build something up. It’s why bad leaders can be much more devastating than the best leaders.

Kevin_Flynn 3 days ago

A very cogent point indeed.

pixl97 3 days ago

That reminds me that I need to see if my copy of Nero Burning ROM still works.

afdbcreid 3 days ago

I agree that the best leaders are devastating. /s

datsci_est_2015 3 days ago

My comment was getting wordy and I kind of gave up if I’m being honest

ticklemyelmo 3 days ago

#1 depends on everyone deploying in a timely manner the fixes that the blue AIs find.

The bad guys are historically much better at keeping their systems current.

Kye 3 days ago

We might see a return of some viruses and worms patching out others so they can keep running, but with AI.

pixl97 3 days ago

That could lead to some interesting paradoxes. A sovereign AI who's tasked itself to make the internet more secure, for example.

anthk 3 days ago

Blaster/Sasser but with AI and now multiplatform, more harmful than macro viruses too.

deadnomore 3 days ago

This is survivor bias because bad guys that suck are ignored as "noise". There is a ton of very low-tech outdated vulnerability scanning going on that is not at all current.

zombot 2 days ago

And since the problem is mostly cultural, not technical, all the technical means that we do have in theory won't help much in practice. So my bet would be a self-inflicted 2).

turbobutton 3 days ago

I was curios if there was a noticable increase in the number of security incidents before 2026 - and the answer seems to be "no". The Identity Theft Resource Center has the following data for Reported Data Compromises in the US (keep in mind that the internet itself has been growing as well):

| Year | Reported US data compromises |

|---|---:|

| 2016 | 1,099 |

| 2017 | 1,506 |

| 2018 | 1,175 |

| 2019 | 1,279 |

| 2020 | 1,107 |

| 2021 | 1,859 |

| 2022 | 1,798 |

| 2023 | 3,202 |

| 2024 | 3,152 |

| 2025 | 3,322 |

Curios what 2026 will look like...

Sources:

https://www.idtheftcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ITR...

https://www.idtheftcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/202...

Forgeties79 3 days ago

Suddenly almost doubling in 2023 and staying there doesn’t strike you as a noticeable increase?

pixl97 3 days ago

Honestly 2023 doesn't make sense to me for the jump. If it was 2024 I'd say that the change in the Linux Kernel bug to CVE policy was this issue.

https://lwn.net/Articles/961978/

But that happened in the first few months of 2024.

sdfhbdf 3 days ago

ChatGPT got released in November 2022....

Forgeties79 3 days ago

I really don’t know what else to say. The numbers are right there. ChatGPT launched in 2022 as the other person pointed out. Correlation is not causation yada yada but you’re dismissing the rate doubling in one year and sitting there right after ChatGPT released.

cyanydeez 3 days ago

the flaws you're seeing are the same that didn't convict donald trump on January 6th.

That's all. full stop. all this AI agent stuff is jazz hands. Large VC funded labs are just "more valuable" to the political establishment than anything else.

thekitze 3 days ago

i will backfill historical data now!

thekitze 3 days ago

I just added historical data and different charts!

jbs789 3 days ago

Simple organisational dynamics. The bad actors are adopting the new tools faster. Things will settle down, as the larger (defensive) orgs catch up.

InsidiousWombat 3 days ago

it is being... optimistic with what it categorises as flaw.

Like "people use AI they paid for to access their bank account, that they paid for" is not exactly exploited CVE

xbar 3 days ago

After the first 8 hours of playing with Mythos, I was asked what I thought. My response, "this generation of LLMs is going to drive the largest wave of security incidents the world has ever seen."

It is still getting started.

hk__2 3 days ago

Isn’t that true for every generation of LLMs?

hsuduebc2 3 days ago

I believe it is. People are able to break into systems using deepseek 4.1 and good harness with proper tools.

tonymet 3 days ago

This has been true for at least 24 months. The smart attackers have injected their backdoors and are lying low. The current hype is just marketing. Severe incidents will pop off when you least expect them to.

ipaddr 3 days ago

Won't those backdoors be discovered? The worry is existing backdoors put in by accident years ago.

tonymet 3 days ago

Imagine a Trojan horse. Once it’s inside the walls, it appears benign. In practice this could be a credential, a phone-home (that wakes up at a later date), a fabrication change to install a rogue component – any number of “backdoors” that are not strictly vulnerabilities.

aduwah 3 days ago

Missed opportunity not to call it pwnhub

a3w 3 days ago

cuck coding, pwn on my watch...

The internet just keeps giving.

hk__2 3 days ago

The "sponsors" are just other random AI-generated websites by the same author.

thekitze 3 days ago

lmfao no, one is my website (https://tinkerer.club) and two are actually startups of people who sponsor me @ https://kitze.io/sponsors :D

prodigycorp 3 days ago

A simple line chart would be more helpful, informative and humbling than a heat map.

alt227 3 days ago

I agree, I personally dont like the heatmap and find it very hard to read.

srveale 3 days ago

I agree, except for how it lets us see that AI agents increasingly don't mind working on the weekends

thekitze 3 days ago

adding multiple charts now!

thekitze 3 days ago

added!

prodigycorp 2 days ago

excellent, thanks. Yes, much more interesting.

b1n 3 days ago

The Sponsors layout looks like a list of the most hacked sites to someone not paying attention.

WarmWash 3 days ago

The thing to watch is what the CCP will do once people start abusing Chinese model capabilities. I don't think China wants to be the face of widespread cyber destruction (and definitely not a victim of it), and it only takes a single unhinged asshole to ruin it for everyone.

Also the flip side where Chinese models are used to attack US infra, just loading artillery shells into the "Ban Chinese Models" cannon.

iAMkenough 3 days ago

They'll probably open source their tech stack and models to provide "defenders" the same capabilities as "attackers."

In the U.S., only the inner circle gets access to "defense" capabilities that match "attack" capabilities.

meerita 3 days ago

We are just witnessing the last days of sloppy human-written code. We'll reach a point where most bugs will be fixed.

mahboi 3 days ago

Most AI-written code is still less thorough about security than a human in most ways, aside from things humans are notoriously bad at like UB in C. I can see a world where maybe a more expensive model audits code afterwards, but the past ~3 years were very sloppy, and it's going to get ugly. There's also still uncertainty about who will have access to unrestricted models that are actually competitive.

meerita 3 days ago

I agree to a certain extent. The code will keep getting better because the training datasets will be built on solid AI-generated code. Maybe in the future, training datasets will be 100% AI-generated code and 0% human-written code. Companies are already rushing to develop self-training AI systems to achieve AGI.

Forgeties79 2 days ago

But the solid ai generated code is still theoretical. Currently they’re being trained on human code and AI generated code with issues.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about LLMs so far it’s that they don’t just invent new or better solutions generally. Nearly everything they do is a facsimile or is otherwise derivative. It’s rarely more than the sum of its parts and often it’s lesser than if we did it ourselves, it’s just fast and cheap. So this idea that AI is going to suddenly magically improve its own code and just get better… I don’t know, I’m not convinced we’ve seen anything like that yet and we’re just speculating it will happen because “it should,” which just feels akin to the crazy promises these companies have been making for years that are clearly not happening.

meerita a day ago

I think agents will loop probes internally, a swarm of them, to test everything until there will be no doubt what is best, what is performant, what will produce a bug, what would be insecure until there's nothing else to probe.

Gigachad 3 days ago

Most AI written code is in Rust through which eliminates most of the problems coming up right now.

mahboi 3 days ago

This fixes specific classes of problems like memory safety. So does writing in any memory-safe language. But there are still vulns in JS, Py, etc code because it's something like screwed up oauth that the lang of course won't catch.

micromacrofoot 3 days ago

we've got to tell these agents to chill out on the density a little, this page could be more informative with half the data because it would be easier to ingest

RankingMember 3 days ago

Definitely wouldn't mind them switching up the theming too- the sites they generate all have the same default theming.

dunder_cat 3 days ago

The rss button doesn't work, kicks back a 404 when you are redirected to https://pwn.watch/feed.xml :-(.

In fact, it seems to be the case for the "json" and "llms.txt" buttons, too.

hk__2 3 days ago

Not surprising for an AI slope website. It looks great until you start clicking buttons and see that everything’s broken.

thekitze 3 days ago

first of all it doesnt look great lmfao second of all it was made in like 15 mins and wasn't supposed to go viral here improving shit now

hsuduebc2 3 days ago

I wonder, why no one bothers to code for hours just for you to not be triggered by dashboard made by a clanker.

I love how everyone is acting now that like in good ol' days(2022) every website was made by a hand with virtually no bugs but a lot of love.

I'm just waiting for someone making "artisan websites"

hk__2 3 days ago

> I love how everyone is acting now that like in good ol' days(2022) every website was made by a hand with virtually no bugs but a lot of love.

Please point out where I said that. It’s not that "in the good old days" websites were perfect, it’s that every single website coded in 15 min with a LLM like this one tries to look great but is full of random bugs that a normal human would have seen if they had done this by hand.

syshyk 3 days ago

Shame on you for expecting a RSS button to show an RSS feed! /s

thekitze 3 days ago

fixing rn txt!

jongjong 3 days ago

Lately I've been thinking that with millions of lines of code, the Linux Kernel is going to be impossible to secure. We'll have to reinvent operating systems from scratch to be minimal single-purpose.

But actually, when I think about the billions of lines of code which our socio-economic system depends on, I feel like the entire social system will have to be scrapped and re-implemented from scratch.

AI is exposing the weakness of centralized software. This industry should always have been competitive. Instead, centralized funding has made it anti-competitive; essentially selecting winners without appropriate battle-testing. Well now all the systems are about to be battle-tested all at once.

ceuk 3 days ago

That "copy instructions got agents" thing is a really great idea. I just used it :)

contravariant 3 days ago

It would have been an ever better idea if I could figure out what it's for before copying :)

baoooooooooooo 3 days ago

Great for a rapid response, but seems... not so secure?

ceuk 3 days ago

Yeah I had to paste it first to check it was safe

Kevin_Flynn 3 days ago

This is a nice website.

Was hunting for a real time graph of incidents and patches, like a stock market chart of the end of the software world, or the birth of artificial consciousness, depending on how squiggly the lines are.

Just the heatmap apparently. :|

Also, as all the humans are installing their "AI on every device" clustering software, the pace of it all should really pick up, and this reminds me of the following SFW movie clip:

"The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last." - Willy Wonka

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oci1CuCht7E

mschuster91 3 days ago

> Ongoing security incidents, newest first: CVEs, what's affected, which versions fix it, and the advisories and posts behind each one.

For fucks sake. The author could have invested at least half an hour to replace this obvious LLM slop regurgitation of the prompt with something of their own.

"Buy sponsor slot for 149$/month", yeah, spotted the grift. For that level of payment it's at least reasonable to expect the design to be something else than the usual LLM garbage mixture of 30 different font styles.

thekitze 3 days ago

i ended up in the hospital today for some virus sorry i didnt have time to perfectly polish this thing i made in 15 mins with grok bot lmfao

and fyi my sponsors are not only for this, they come from https://kitze.io/sponsors :D

mariusvaporware 2 days ago

Huh. This looks pretty complementary to something I created a few months ago

https://supplychain.fail/

(CVE severity timeline)

nkoren 3 days ago

It would be less exhaustive to list what isn't.

pelagicAustral 3 days ago

I'd probably add the on-hold queue of Zone-H... and verified stuff from the past week. Maybe just the Special Defacement reports.

loloquwowndueo 3 days ago

Please don’t default to extremely-hard-to-read dark mode. Honor my system preference - it’s there for a reason.

pjungwir 3 days ago

Pretty funny to look at Saturday & Sunday. The hackers decided to start working weekends?

foruhar 3 days ago

Saturday and Sunday are not weekends worldwide. Much of the middle east, Brunei, Nepal, and a few others have non-Monday-Friday work weeks.

DrewADesign 3 days ago

> Major U.S. banks detect unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts

Step 2 is instead of waiting to be caught, the instigators should issue a press release blaming cunning rogue agents as part of their research, call no felonies because they’re working for the greater good of eliminating a shitload of jobs, say the real problem is a lack of regulation. They could even return the money if it looks like they’re going to get sued, and collect some sweet, sweet reflexive investment money.

stickfigure 3 days ago

This is most likely actual customers deliberately giving their agents access.

Which is an interesting problem, what happens when the agent fucks up and the customer loses lots of money? Who is responsible?

If the official policy is "no agents", it shifts the blame.

dingaling911 3 days ago

If a peasant breaks rules and loses money, it's their fault.

If a connected person breaks rules and loses money, it's someone else's fault.

I don't make the rules, I just break them.

dist-epoch 3 days ago

corollary: if you own the bank $100 and you can't pay, you have a problem. if you own the bank $100 mil and you can't pay the bank has a problem

toomuchtodo 3 days ago

Citi becomes latest US bank to restrict AI agents from accessing accounts - https://www.ft.com/content/f49c8e39-f07f-4177-9948-aabe55e5e... | https://archive.today/0AlZP

Part of it is "human in the loop" for write actions, part of it is commercial banks are deathly terrified of agents being able to move deposits around rapidly to maximize yield, as those deposits are cheap cost of capital banks use to lend against. Historically, deposits of unsophisticated financial services consumers were sticky, and that assumption is breaking down. Agents can be consumer copilots towards information asymmetry in this context.

"computah, maximize rate of return, minimize interest expenses, manage cashflow, make no mistakes."

hollowonepl 3 days ago

Apologies if this is vulgar but what kind of idiot grants access to his own bank account to AI agent. I don’t see logic here outside maybe B2B so accounting systems use AI while accessing accounts, like part of ERP system integration which is interesting case to confirm who and how allows that technically so IT could also educate itself and its accounting department and partners about the precedence… outside that it’s just plain stupid!

willchis 3 days ago

I think I need to use the quote here: "think of a person with average intelligence and then understand that 50% of people are dumber". It's going to be a bloodbath because even if the banks block agents there will still be third-party apps like Robinhood, Venmo, BroApp2027 that are given access and they'll be hooked up to agents.

DrewADesign 2 days ago

I’m willing to bet 98% of developers buy cars, practical tools, appliances, houses, electronics, etc. without personally verifying that the one they’re getting is suitable for its advertised uses. Developers have subject matter expertise in software, and to a lesser extent, computers. They don’t have to know how to inspect a transmission to have recourse if their new car has one not suitable for its advertised uses. My mechanic shouldn’t have to know how to evaluate a software product to determine that the underpinnings are suitable for its advertised use case. This industry overrun with hucksters and there’s zero accountability.

cyanydeez 3 days ago

the official policy is: whoever has the least number of lawyers and most number of lobbiests.

None of that has changed.

DrewADesign 3 days ago

Seems pretty straightforward to me. If the customer set the agent in motion, the customer is no less responsible for the damage than someone that (as i think Cal Newport said) ties a weedwacker to a dog. It’s reckless.

If they were sold a product that claimed to be safe, they could in turn sue whoever sold it to them. Jeep’s insurance wouldn’t pay someone I crashed into because of defect in my jeep, but I could in turn sue Jeep for my legal trouble.

direwolf20 3 days ago

For example POLi. If you pay by giving your bank creds to POLi and they steal your money, you can't sue your bank but you can sue POLi.

fckgw 3 days ago

Banks have had a long standing policy that if you willing hand over your credentials, you are responsible for any losses. This applies to AI agents as well as scammers.

skybrian 3 days ago

Such policies might not be legal in the US:

> The indefensible extension is that banks aren’t liable for defrauded customers. That is a potential policy regime, chosen by the polity of many democratic nations. The United States is not one of those nations. Our citizens, through their elected representatives, made the considered choice that financial institutions would need to provide extraordinary levels of safety in electronic payments. In reliance upon that regime, the people of the United States transacted many trillions of dollars over payment rails, which was and is very lucrative for all considered.

...

> With a limited number of carveouts (e.g. wire transfers), Reg E is intentionally drafted to be future-proof against changes in how Americans transact. This is why, when banks argue that some new payments rail is exempt because it is “different,” the correct legal response is usually some variation of: doesn’t matter—that’s Reg E.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/regulation-e/

0xdeadbeefbabe 3 days ago

Where's the interest? It's the customer's fault.

outworlder 3 days ago

Yeap. Most likely Muse, Grok Bot and things like that.

Honestly, US banks and credit unions should get their heads out of their asses and learn from it. There's a _reason_ people connect banks to YNAB, Monarch Money and stuff like that, and a reason why they might want an AI agent. They need the info. They may also need to make automated transactions, something companies have access to, but the ordinary person does not.

My landlord wants Zelle. I cannot schedule payments on my credit union. It's not like I can update the app since it lives inside their systems. So I have to login monthly. I debated getting another bank account and giving it to Muse just for that purpose.

Banks in the US are a couple of decades behind, say, Brazilian banks. Instant transfers to another bank were a thing since the early 2000s. And for years now you can do it from anyone to anyone, no third party app required. To the dismay of Visa and Mastercard.

tredre3 3 days ago

> I debated getting another bank account and giving it to Muse just for that purpose.

The point of getting the second bank account is to reduce the blast radius if the agent goes haywire, I suppose?

But then you'll have to manually top up that account every now and then, how does it solve your initial problem?

kenhwang 3 days ago

Most banks let you schedule recurring transfers.

eszed 3 days ago

Some banks can schedule transfers, but not payments. Or, not payments by specific routes. My credit union will cut a paper check and mail it to your bank (yes, that's seriously what they actually do), but can't schedule Zelle, or (maybe they can do it now, but they couldn't a few years ago) an electronic transfer.

Like someone else up-thread, my experience moving back to the US from Europe, ~15 years ago, was like stepping back to the financial dark ages. It's a bit better now (Zelle, Plaid, Mint / Monarch - though I'm well-aware of the privacy downsides of those third-party platforms), but the industry isn't close to catching up with the fifteen-year-old state of the art, let alone, say, Indian or Brazilian micro-transaction networks.

SoftTalker 3 days ago

My credit union is the same. You can set up automatic/periodic transfers from one account to another at the same credit union, but to "transfer" money to an account at another bank you use the "bill pay" system which ends up as a check (possibly an ECH or maybe an actual paper check, depending on which bank is receiving the funds).

sroussey 3 days ago

Yes, I pay my HOA fees via bill pay so they write a check and send it next door via the mail. This is Wells Fargo.

Also, they remove the money when they mail the check… not when it gets cashed.

SoftTalker 3 days ago

Mine was that way, but they changed so that it's like a regular check and funds are only withdrawn when the check is cashed. I suppose there might have been some difficulty explaining what they were doing with all the money for the checks that were never presented for payment.

jmtulloss 3 days ago

This is why I moved to Mercury. It’s good tech.

stickfigure 3 days ago

I used Mercury for a startup a few years ago, they were great. Looks like they have personal banking now, but it's $20/mo unless you also have a business account.

tcdent 3 days ago

I don't understand why this is considered a security incident. Human behavior incident, sure, but this is not a vulnerability.

jimmis 3 days ago

It used to be the case that the average person didn't "know enough to get into trouble" when it came to software. But now that's not even necessary. I can imagine a layman asking Muse or some other agent something mundane like "why can't I transfer from Bank A to Bank B?" and unwittingly sending it down a rabbit hole where it's trying to gather sensitive info from places that consumers aren't intended to be able to access. Ultimately, it's just exposing pre-existing vulnerabilities. But the job of infosec definitely has gotten, and will continue to get, much harder I think.

taytus 3 days ago

User fault. Easy.

lifeisloving 3 days ago

Corporate Personhood in the agentic age.

mahboi 3 days ago

Misleading title; it's not pwnage, or at least not known. The customers authorized the agents. The "unauthorized" part is that the bank didn't want customers using agents.

ceroxylon 3 days ago

This was the most concerning part of that report for me:

>Some banks also saw agents contact call centers or take actions that appeared independent of user instructions, and executives say they often can't tell a human from an agent, or an authorized agent from a rogue one.

ghm2180 3 days ago

_Most_ people park liquid money in mainstream bank's checking accounts. This money is FDIC insured(upto 250K). The job of this bank is to is money is used by banks to make loans (duh!). There are three "modes" (in increasing yield_ order offered by these banks to account holders:

1. [FDIC] Put it in a Chase, BofA account. < 1% typically. Abysmal returns.

2. [FDIC] A higher yield checking/saving account(Ally at ~3.1 is a good example): But more hoops[1] to get more than 3.5%(today). Here https://www.wsj.com/buyside/personal-finance/banking/best-hi... the list.

3. [Not FDIC but pretty good**] A higher yield Money market mutual fund. You still need to place a buy order[2]. Something you have to do manually can give you around 3.86% today(See SNAXX)

This last case is more _interesting_ because its easy for agents. But consider what happens when a lot of people use muse to enmasse do this. There can be a run on the banks because[3] its not the same "money" in the balance sheet of the bank. Money leaving checking/savings and entering a MMF is not on the balance sheet of the bank(even though it can be coincidentally the same institution e.g. schwab checkig and schwab brokerage). Agents are a BIG threat to regular banks. I don't even see how it can be prevented, local agents are ubiquitous now.

[1] Exceptions are HY checkings but its hard to chase yield logistically: more hoops to jump like minimum balance or max ceiling, minimum transactions etc.

[2] See this from schwab's site: ``` For uninvested cash you do not plan to spend soon, you can consider investing in a money market fund such as the Schwab Prime Advantage Money Fund (SWVXX), which currently yields 3.71%, (7-day yield as of 2026-10-21), and can be purchased in a single trade with no minimum* and no transaction fee. Visit the Schwab Money Funds page to view all available funds and their current yields. ```

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPkJH6BT7dM

** MM funds are banks lending to each other to park overnight cash and borrow temporarily for actitivities, think of its like a bank's bank. In 2008 when the GFC was happening the fed had to step in and "ensure" this supply because a lot of banks were teetering and if one bank could not access its money or borrow for daily activities, no more cash would come from an atm.

matwood 3 days ago

I typically park my cash in SGOV since the interest is mostly state tax free. It also tracks treasury rates in nearly real time.

cantrevealname 3 days ago

> But consider what happens when a lot of people use muse to enmasse do this. There can be a run on the banks because it's not the same "money" in the balance sheet of the bank.

But isn't this self-correcting? If everybody starts moving money from checking/savings accounts to money market funds to get better rates, then the bank will start offering better interest rates in their checking/savings accounts so people won't do that.

SoftTalker 3 days ago

CDs are another, you're locking up your money for 3-12 months but you can get over 4% in some cases.

jongjong 3 days ago

Governments will have to legalize hacking or else it's going to be unfair if only criminals get access to the wealth transfer from the loot.

Bang2Bay 3 days ago

We could only imagine the day when physically bots look human

ethanj8011 3 days ago

I hate this website's AI slop design man. Just to pick out some pieces. Why the random circles, why do I care how many people are "here". Why is the text of the number of incidents so small. Why is everything so busy, why is there so much text full of things I don't need to read. Why are they all presented at the same loudness.

wpm 3 days ago

All vibed and they couldn't bring a light-mode UI. The contrast on some of this text is terrible.

I can't wait until this leet hakur ShadyCN slop gets trained out of the models, I'm so sick of looking at it.

goody71 3 days ago

The bots love that whatever tailwind theme that is.

AStrangeMorrow 3 days ago

To be fair I also like that them. But many of these themes that used to be “oh this is a nice website” now make me go “oh AI generated!”