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Comment by cubefox

5 hours ago

So either there was another (but non-public) leak or someone else discovered the exploit almost at the same time as it was about to be published. I guess the latter is much less likely because it would be a major coincidence.

9 comments

cubefox

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post-it  4 hours ago

The attacker may have known about the exploit for a long time and were saving it, but upon finding out that it was about to be disclosed, they decided it was now or never.

  • cubefox  3 hours ago

    How could he have known on Oct 17 that it was about to be disclosed? The dates only leaked on Oct 20.

    • stickfigure  3 hours ago

      You're asking: How could a hacker - with an exploit that potentially allows him/her to break into half the computers on the internet - know some secret information that is stored on a computer on the internet?

      It could also just have been a run-of-the-mill exploit in WordPress.

      1 reply →

wahern  3 hours ago

With everybody using LLMs there are no coincidences. Popular LLM platforms are like Oracles that help you identify what other people have been working on. "Find a bug in PHP" might have been useless s few months ago, but once somebody used it to develop a full exploit the LLM will start to regurgitate that information.

  • fn-mote  3 hours ago

    > once somebody used it to develop a full exploit the LLM will start to regurgitate that information

    Sure about that?

    Not my understanding of how the LLMs currently work. There’s a cutoff date and no new info after that date is included in training.

    Info to the contrary welcome.

    • jonhohle  2 hours ago

      Frontier models absolutely have access to current information. I just asked Claude about my fantasy football line up. It knew current injury reports, line ups and stats. Google search AI had even more information than that.

      However, I’ve done some original research regarding an area that the internet has wrong and that doesn’t seem to have back propagated yet.

    • disgruntledphd2  3 hours ago

      > Not my understanding of how the LLMs currently work. There’s a cutoff date and no new info after that date is included in training.

      You are almost certainly correct in terms of how the public models work. I guess it's possible that the labs have some tools connected for more recent stuff like this, but it seems unlikely.