I immediately saw the Ghidra one and was thinking: huh?

> Yes, if you overwrite binaries executed by ghidra, you can trigger code execution.

> but it's probably worth noting that "RMI" stands for Remote Method Invocation

This reminds me of someone submitting a (clearly vibecoded) vulnerability report claiming to have found a way to execute arbitrary SQL. The project in question? An SQL server... https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/pull/4322

>The first requires being able to overwrite binaries in the Swift tool directory.

Does it? Or does it need to be in the same directory you invoked ghidra?

This is not what I heard from folks who worked directly with mythos. I was told that the vulnerabilities it generated were largely real and meaningful.

The Gitea one looks marginally interesting, but is probably not exploitable in practice (unless Gitea or whoever else isn’t properly isolating jobs on dedicated VMs). I suspect GitHub Actions has similar behavior and is not considered exploitable because the user is assumed to already have local, non-namespaced root access.

The bigger takeaway is someone that smart is pissed off and dropping their shit with zero warning... but hey, that's just like, my opinion man.

I'm no expert on any of these programs, but that's kinda the problem, isn't it? No single person is an expert on every codebase supposedly exploited in this repo.

After a bit of research, the Firefox one seems plausible to me. But, I haven't actually tried the POC. The explanation about the private-data and untrusted-input flags is plausible but I'm not an expert on Firefox's internals, maybe that's not actually how it works.

This just sucks, all around. Are we going to need every open source project gawking at the same repo full of stuff that has nothing to do with them, on the off chance that someone discloses a vuln that does have to do with them? Is this some kind of performative complaint about high friction in responsible disclosure? Well great job dickhead, you've just made a system that's even worse. Nobody benefits from this. Yuck yuck yuck.

Was just thinking it would be hilarious if these were all known CVEs hiding the next Shai-Hulud inside of them and waiting to compromise security hobbyists rushing to download them.

Why is that surprising? LLMs can churn out arbitrary volumes of "documentation" in an instant.

That seems trivial for an llm to provide.

Yes, big pet peeve of the new world. Every em dash is apparently an AI trigger. Back in my day, they were a sign of great respect within my people.

I've only heard it used as Retr0id's definition.

> A friendly reminder that a 0-day is a vulnerability that wasn't known until after a malicious actor exploited it.

No, the full name was always "zero-day exploit". The number 0 refers to the days between the vulnerability being known by the vendor and the public availability of the exploit. So the vendor has zero days to create a security patch before the release of the exploit.

The term "zero-day vulnerability" is a derived term to refer to a vulnerability affected by a zero-day exploit. Similarly, a "zero-day attack" is a derived term to refer to an attack carried out using a zero-day exploit.

wouldn't it be trivial to match the repo to the user logs?

I actually prefer them being public than in some governments or corporations toolbox

> Nobody benefits from this

Disclosures always enable more secure software to theoretically exist,

even if nobody follows through creating it.

They often do.

It wouldn't be the first time!

You can just download the zip over HTTPS

Honestly execution complexity is over time becoming a lower and lower barrier too.

Yep and typically none of this is meaningful unless you have no security practices at all. You can't have it both ways. Every security team says these things are all critical even though, for example, it's only being used internally. Cool, so you somehow have our network cert, are on site physically, have compromised a laptop fully without all of our tools detecting weird shit, have a password, admin access to the repo, somehow are spoofing MFA, etc etc. Yeah it all adds up, but as an admin I'm just fucking done dropping everything for these kinds of things.

Firewalled VM, locked-in keyboard/mouse, 1 query to any agent and it's setup.

You all need a better system than US SSNs

You can buy your SSN for $6-$10.

RCE has no meaning either in these situations. The "remote" part is usually an ssh root session if it means anything at all.

Open source is a good thing, but I don't think what you are proposing is accurate.

A different way to frame this would be that those bugs would never be surfaced or exploited if the software were proprietary.

Presumably, one could let the bots loose on your own codebase first. The question is one of financing of course. If your end users are enterprises willing to pay for a support contract, they probably care enough about not getting hacked to endure the higher prices that would let you throw enough tokens at the problem. Other open-source projects might have a harder time.

While i can follow your path, maybe because i see the same, i sadly have seen in groups of friends how this can go sideways very fast. If you report things, some companies gone treat you as a criminal/offensive actor and even go legal actions against you even you just tellem here you got this vuln.

Sure you than can do it anonymous and so on but point is : its not like every actor that gets notified will react thankful to it. Some even just ignore it.

User/admin discretion for software they use should be a big factor, sometimes getting burned is how you learn to play with fire. Or decide that having your data/participation disrespected means you need to set harder boundaries. My solution is to try things in isolation, run very few services, try to avoid becoming dependent on the online, appreciate the offline and local first.

You don't need to be pissed off to decide that immediate public disclosure is the best option.

Gitea action runner has a bunch of different ways to setup and doing the isolation properly looks tricky. The documentation doesn't provide any isolation tests to administrators, either.

The biggest mitigation is that gitea documentation discourages you from using action runners from untrusted users. Not flawless security, but it's something...

No, the days start counting from the availability of a patch.

all vulnerabilities are just bugs.

> It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed.

Seems like we're already in the middle of this phase, but rather than dying down, the 'reports' have just gotten more noisy and obtuse, making it more difficult to establish the actual degree of threat / attack vector.

> a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them.

I really think this characterization is misleading. It's not "getting smart", only more tailored toward a specific usage, better curated dataset, better harness, better prompts, better labeling of results, documentation of failures and success, etc.

The outcome is (hopefully) overall better but this anthropomorphized wording makes it sound like AI itself is somehow changing or evolving. No, both academia doing fundamental research, industry making it available commercially, and finally security researchers making the entire tooling and process packaged as a service are actively shaping it to make it better. There is no "it".

We need our infrastructure to stop treating bank account numbers and social security numbers as secrets. At least in the US, bank account numbers appear on physical checks and are required to be shared in order to do an ACH transfer, and a social security number is not supposed to be used as an identifier (unless to the Social Security Administration itself) or as a secret password.

Ideally, nothing nefarious should happen if both of them were listed and queryable publicly.

Then, don't rush and take a few minutes to set up a virtual machine.

... support cash, tell your neighbors

Repo claims

> A single archive of public exploit PoCs and vulnerability research writeups. At the time I post these, none have been reported. Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz. Please do not abuse these. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I've always found this is the most efficient way.

Which is roughly the definition of zero day. Whether the contents of the repo reflect the above claim is something else entirely.

llms are fantastic disassembly partners, they're quite good at labeling functions from various dissassemblers -- the net losses from losing the benefits of open source , imo , outweigh the protection afforded by hiding your source code in yet another layer that is more and more easily unrolled through automated procedures.

> I don't know what methods where used to find these exploits but I am starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing in this day and age, where someone can just let bots loose on your codebase.

I'd love to hear why you think obscurity is bad, if you now think maybe it's good in the LLM age?

I'd also be interested if you could describe exactly what or how you think security through obscurity works, or doesn't?

I've been thinking a lot about how to better teach this concept, so I'm looking to understand exactly how everyone thinks/understands how it currently works, or should work, or what it should do. I don't care about the "correct" answer, (I have ddg too :P) I'm interested in general expectations from SWE's that I might teach at work, instead of opinions of security eng speaking about theory.

How bad are your security practices that these tiny obscure things matter? None of these findings that show up here on HN should even make you flinch. The alarmist takes on this stuff is fucking exhausting and I'm tired of security teams bugging me about it. Do your job and this shit doesn't matter AT ALL.

But do people actually find these vulnerabilities on their own, or are they using LLMs? I was curious about how these vulnerabilities work, so I tried asking my dear friend Mr. CLAUDE, but he immediately threw an error and ended the session because it was a cybersecurity question. Enterprise APIs block even the analysis itself, so it's amazing that people can actually pull this off in practice.

The question is whether the m-dashes are surrounded by spaces or not. The spaces are utterly maddening. But yeah, RIP the mdash, who would have thought.

I was thinking that the other definition was right and this correction was wrong.

Then I did some searching and found multiple examples of both definitions in use, making things murky.

So I turned to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: “ of, relating to, or being a vulnerability (as in a computer or computer system) that is discovered and exploited (as by cybercriminals) before it is known to or addressed by the maker or vendor”

And of course they use an “or” to make it ambiguous as to whether the days start counting when the vulnerability becomes known, or when the vendor has addressed it.

what if a path is never released?

> The biggest mitigation is that gitea documentation discourages you from using action runners from untrusted users.

This recommendation seems incompatible with third-party collaboration, at least on its face!

I still use them frequently. On iOS you just tap the hyphen twice, and it inserts an em dash—sorta like that.

I might like to see a collection of pre-2022 em-dash usage—a subset I suppose of the Low Background Steel category (https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai).

You completely misunderstanding the comment feels like an AI trigger

Yes, of course. I’m definitely anthropomorphizing as a shorthand. I’m the first one to say that these models are just a lot of matrix math.

Vulns are a subset of bugs. What the above commenter is saying, is that some bugs don't belong to this category.

Ok, I don't know their emotional state. Fair point.

Maybe I'm projecting my own biases ;-)

le sigh, c-ares. Very predictable outcome. If you ever find yourself entertaining the idea that you will simply write non-blocking network protocol stacks in C with manual lifetime management, slap yourself. It doesn't matter if you think you are a super genius of unimpeachable taste. The job is impossible.

I used to be an em-dash user, but now my opinion is that I’d rather be perceived as someone who does not want to be confused with an LLM. So I’ve changed my writing style.

I propose that humans use Unicode U+2E3B three em dash ⸻ it is an impressively long character.

Do you have a definition of "smart" such that there is something an AI could do to prove itself intelligent?

Or are you just defining "fast" as something only horses can do, and considering that a useful insight about cars?

But not the other way around, which makes them different.

And if you are a state agency who'd like to keep the undisclosed zero-days you rely on secret, spamming maintainers with reports makes sense.

As a bonus if you find any actual zero-days in your mass-generated ones you don't report it and get a new one to play with.

Hang on, can you actually do something nefarious with just the bank account number?

And Monero for online.

It’s quite ridiculous that we haven’t been able to build a modern identification system capable of replacing SSNs in the last 30 years.

Security through obscurity can make something a bit more secure in practice by annoying an attacker IF AND ONLY IF you're not relying on the hidden information remaining secret in order to the system remaining secure. E.g., if you're using a broken cipher and assume this is ok because no one knows which cipher you're using, you're gonna have a bad time.

In the case of FOSS software, it is generally recognized that the small advantage of keeping the source secret is far outweighted by the contributions and vuln reports you get if you publish the source.

People have always used tools. Some people have better tools than others. I guess the line is thin whether they found on their own or not.

If you want to chat with Claude about this, I'd recommend using Opus 4.6. IME it's happy to talk about (and even write) PoC exploits

I imagine this is a large open model like GLM5.2 etc

What about all the virtual machine zero days?

til you get debanked

And isn't it also mostly a transitioning issue. Those open codebases will be constantly scanned for potential security issues and getting more and more hardened. There are probably a lot of easy wins that are going to be discovered over the next few years but it should taper out after a while.

> Please do not abuse these.

Reminds me of Jamie Wolf's joke about bestiality laws. Who are those for? What stops most people from bestiality is… not wanting to have sex with animals! For people who do want to, what, they won't because of… the law??

Who will this comment stop??

disassembly only applies to client side software

something like nginx could arguably be more secure if it was closed source

(I am a proponent of and contributor to open source)

"one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them" - Claude Shannon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

I said "doesn't matter" to someone once... the resulting lesson came in the form of a reply from the whitehat researcher (waves, hi brian!) a 16step exploit chain resulting in a one click full account takeover.

I'm equally annoyed and over the alarmist takes. But I don't think it's fair to group mine into it. I'm annoyed at seeing discard respect for others into the same void everyone is happy to toss quality.

Do these tiny things matter? No, not to the default-panic-level everyone adopts when they see 0day, or CVE... but duh, I'm now just repeating exactly what you already said. That no, for the record is mostly because I don't use any of these, not just because they're boring exploits. While I always look, I default assume anything CVE is boring/pointless. But I still read them.

But then, I'm not trying to convince the owner of the repo. I'm trying to discourage the theme among researchers that "no one cares", because I have seen researchers disclose bugs publicly, that we'd be eager to pay out on, because they disagreed with the decision on their last report.

I've fixed bugs being actively exploited against our users, that was found/fixed only after a whitehat report for something adjacent (we pay on those btw, and you should too). I don't wanna live in the world where it's easier for the bad guys, the only way we get there is once "everyone knows", you gotta report the all bugs that you can turn into an exploit. I don't want "the whitehat researcher culture" to move towards, who cares' dump the PoC on github, screw anyone that could be hurt by the bad guys, they deserve to be punished for the incompetence of others. SWE's are shit at security, security researchers are shit at SWE, the only way we get the good outcome, is if they're willing (and encouraged) to work together.

It’s so they don’t train on AI data, right?

Meanwhile, some dude was just playing with claude and accidentally made his repo public.

My feeling is that my writing doesn't sound anything like an LLM, and so if someone thinks I'm an LLM because I used an em-dash, that's on them. That, or I royally screwed up and need to do a better job as a writer. At least with today's LLMs.

Thank goodness I use a GC language

It’s fine to use em-dashes — just be srre to add typos.

let’s market it as “human dash”

And if it ever catches on with LLMs ⸻⸻ we just make it longer

Code switching in the post LLM era.

I mean. Makes sense until adversary states start walking through the same doors you’re using. At which point you might regret that maintainers are too flooded to deal with it.

Assuming, of course, said state agency is operating under sufficiently strategic governance and management…

Yes but there are steep penalties for bank fraud so it is not especially common

Actually, Mudge of the l0pht (and later DARPA) once famously made the claim that all bugs are security issues waiting to be exploited in some way (I’m probably paraphrasing). I kind of agree. Although, the bugs on this dump are indeed mostly pretty lame, which is exactly what I’ve seen you get a lot of when you let an llm go bug hunting with no human vetting and confirmation in the loop.

It’s possible/likely that whomever is running this experiment is keeping the non slop bugs to themselves. It’s probably what I’d do.

A future AI may be intelligent, but LLMs are clearly not. They have no agency, no ability to reason, and no world model. The most effective way to use them is to treat them as next token prediction machines, because that’s what they are.

AFAIK that's US thing. In normal countries bank account numbers are not a secret. The worst thing that can happen is someone sending you money.

I now use "ASCII em-dashes" by using two hyphens -- like this. Or--if you prefer no spaces--like this.

They're just so handy! I do think LLMs tend to use them in a specific way, though.

So maybe tweaking your usage (ex. no spaces around them) or using a technically incorrect en-dash might offer the desired effect while subtly signaling that your message isn't AI-generated.

I still use them — mostly for pauses — but I'd like to think my voice sounds distinct enough from an AI that people can tell.

If someone has your bank account and bank’s routing number (which is also not secret), they can make fraudulent ACH transfers and payments from your account. Of course it will most likely be caught as fraud some time after the fact, but just those two bits of not-secret info are enough to grief someone.

Buy a VM in the cloud?

Those seem like two different scenarios though, right?

The point of beastiality laws are to give society some recourse to punish people who abuse animals.

There was a very famous case back in Washington state back in the early 2000s where a group of men were sexually abusing horses. It was uncovered because one of them died, and the other could only be charged with trespassing because it wasn't illegal at the time to sexually abuse animals.

Well, it's a joke because the problem becomes apparent after you think a bit about it. The exact same reasonig can be applied to anything illegal, criminals are criminals because they don't respect the law, so you could try to say that laws are useless. Reality is, if something is illegal not only someone can be punished after the fact, but in some cases also preventive measures can be taken.

Regarding the comment, it isn't going to stop anyone. Most people will not do cybercrime because they're honest. Of the remaining, the risk of being sentenced to jail time will instead stop some people, even if not all of them.

If it stops even just 1 person once, isn't it already worth it?

Um, the nginx binary would have to be in the hands of hundreds of thousands of server operators. And the set of server operators is rich in the kind of person who would attack it. Not to mention the huge number of leaks you'd get.

Maybe if it's some server-side software that you only use yourself...

The jury, maybe.

Either the fear of the consequences of breaking the law, or that the most effective way to reduce crime is to remove criminals from the population so over time these people being in jail or worse decreases the crime rate. They don't have to care about breaking laws in the abstract for the law, properly enforced, to reduce crime.

Only until a single server running nginx is hacked and the binary leaked though...

No one is doing 16 step exploits unless you're a huge target in some way. 0.0000001% of companies fit that bill. And even then, ok, what did they get? An account login? What are they doing to do? Read email? Then what? "Use it for social engineering"? Who cares, you have MFA right? You have a firewall? You don't allow people to randomly jump from box to box via RDP? You have basic security and auditing on your fileshares? EVEN THEN, what, they get a spreadsheet from your last town hall meeting? I'm also tired of pretending that 99.999% of the data in a company even matters. Unless they have some way to cryptolock your whole company, AND you don't have backups/snapshots without any basic access security, there isn't a lot of value to be taken. Security "teams" are a bunch of fucking busybodies with nothing to do. Pay for a competent admin team and the security dept is completely redundant and useless.

Cash doesn't require a bank.

Fair point but it assumes we all have access to LLMs with the same capabilities.

The laws are to punish the act once discovered. Not to inhibit it, primarily. Which I suppose cuts down on the incidence of the act in the long run,

> Who are those for?

The people who want to see the people doing bestiality punished

That’s a whole lot of “we” to not mention which company you’re at that supposedly plays well with security researchers/has a proper bug bounty.

If you believe this, then why did you say?

> starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing

Nah, I’ve started noticing people doing this replacement automatically in LLM output. I just try not to write with dashes anymore.

the nn dash remains the goat. the arg dash

I've only ever been using "regular" dash, a minus, for that. How do you even type yours? If I ever needed differently-sized dashes (and I don't know the difference between them) I always used wiki to copy them.

(disclaimer: I feel like this obsession with dashes is special to native English speakers, which I'm obviously not)

Knuth had to stop sending real checks for errors spotted in his books because they would post pics of the check and thieves abused the account https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

I for one am striving for clarity and couldn't care less about being confused with AI.

However I've only ever used regular dashes. How do you type an em-dash? Is it OS specific? I've taken to using Emacs insert-char with a list of frequently used ones in my scratch buffer. My memory for Unicode is unreliable.

And both numbers, plus your name and address and a convenient sample of your signature, are on every check you’ve ever written.

That’s one school of thought. Law as a tool to punish those who have committed a prohibited act, mostly reactive.

Others consider law a way of encoding the group’s existing rules and norms.

In that view, making something illegal or mandatory is not a prerequisite for punishment: it’s the actual main point.

The threat of punishment is meant for those not deterred from an act by the simple fact it is illegal (and the threat only works if enforced).

Others put it the other way around, and see law as social engineering, a way to shape the group, either through the encoding itself of the desired behaviours in law, or through deterrence. Or both. If what one is after is either power or legitimacy, they need compliance more than punishment (can’t rule once you’ve chopped everyone’s heads off, or once the mob has put yours on a spike).

It’s also sometimes used as coordination (which side of the road we drive on).

And there’s also law as dispute resolution (if your neighbour’s hen lays an egg in your garden, who does it belong to? Yes, it’s ridiculous. Yes, some places have one or more laws for that). Which, incidentally, both requires and provides legitimacy. Funny, that.

And probably many other kinds / points of view, with many different purposes, intents, and mechanisms.

Anyway, all that to say law is vast, fascinating, and utterly tedious. And apologies for the tangent.

Even if the company doesn't have a big bounty publishing exploit code without warning them is unethical. Moreover, a lot of these projects are FOSS without a company which could pay bug bounties.

I don't want to "see" any of it...

Because of asymmetric differences, I don't have access to powerful LLMs but attackers might. And also the complexities of software dependencies (supply chain vulnerabilities), my software depends on packages not in my control and I don't have time to audit the entire stack.

Kinda does?

I don't think that's exactly it. OSS only needs someone to have a strong LLM to check for bugs. If your software is proprietary, it's a competition between just you and whatever model you have vs any attacker and whatever model they can lay hand to.

Banks are kinda useful to avoid getting robbed all your money, on a regular basis.

Many French people with crypto money experienced that the hard way recently.

Macs have a native way to do dashes: option- hyphen for en-dash and option shift hyphen for em-dash. On Windows there are some application-specific ways that make sense, e.g. in Office, but outside that you’re on your own and have to use the “hold alt and type the character codes” method! Or charmap.

Keyboard layout specific. Macs with their default English layout use “option-shift-dash” which is really easy to remember (and relatively discoverable, as such things go) which is why using proper m-dashes (not just double-dashes) used to be a strong indicator a poster was using a Mac, before LLMs took the character over.

On iOS you type it by pressing dash and holding until alternative options come up, same way you type e.g. accented characters.

I don't see the difference.

> OSS only needs someone to have a strong LLM to check for bugs.

The same applies to propietary, closed-source code. It being closed-source means that the source isn't generally available, but the executable is. Hence, someone with a strong model can still reverse it and find vulns.

Doesn't at all. You can take cash, keep cash and spend cash without any bank being involved at all. Cash is more anonymous than crypto and (if it's USD) taken just about everywhere.

Banks give you an advantage with transaction security and deposit insurance, but that's dealing with money and not cash.

do you have links about the french people?

Sure, here are a few links. Use your favourite translator.

In short, it's a very active and growing activity. Many data leaks helped people to identify wealthy targets. Some just brag about having crypto.

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2026/04/24/enlevement...

https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/cryptomonnaies-la-vag...

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/08/19/l-ascensio... (paywall)

https://www.slate.fr/societe/enlevements-lies-cryptomonnaies...

Some random recent ones we know about:

https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/grand-est/haut-rhin/mu...

https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/renseignes-par-des-ha...