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Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

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Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#321

Post by Sharlin »

hilariously wrote: post #313
_verandaguy wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACLs, nothing, we've known about in-band signalling since forever and still this whole segment of the industry seems to either not know about it, or forgets about it at a cadence so regular it may as well not know about it. System-level ACLs; mandatory or discretionary access control; secure-by-default application and network configurations are all for naught if you take an LLM, run it with all the privileges you'd h…

It's just purposeful blindness - I worked for a company building out tooling that insisted markdown based security was good enough and showed it off for anyone at the company to attack because they were so sure. It took me less than 5 minutes to completely disable... nobody cared, they just kept going - check the box and move on.

Something something salary depending on it.

Software "engineering" in particular has always been more than 50% cargo culting. Good engineering practices never matter when the alternative is just going through the motions of whatever rituals are in vogue.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#322

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

khalic wrote: post #258
12345ieee wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unix users are THE tool to restrict tool permissions, at any given time there's 20+ services on a Unix machine that run in their user.

And how many of those services can check your box and find permission escalation strategies on its own?

Malware has been bundling rootkits for decades, so potentially all of them. Sometimes the attacks succeed, so these are defenses that need continual hardening, but there's no sense in setting up an entirely separate line of defense just because this time the threat has AI in it.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#323

Post by pseudosavant »

Maybe I'm just too risk adverse to run with scissors with Grok? I can't imagine ever trusting their harness.

I'll just add this to the list of things an AI company could do to guarantee I'd never use them. You know, like the AI referring to itself as Mecha Hitler, making non-consensual porn (even of minors), or deferring to Elon's tweets as authoritative references on topics.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#324

Post by khalic »

chrisweekly wrote: post #288
khalic wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as air tight as a container Edit: it’s about the attack surface

microvms are better than containers running on your host. see eg the "smolvm" microvms from https://smolmachines.com

thanks, will take a closer look

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#325

Post by drnick1 »

drnick1 wrote: post #244

You should ALWAYS run your agent as separate, unprivileged, UNIX user, never in your main account. If you absolutely need to run it as your own user, you should bubblewrap it. I do this for things like Steam, games, or other "blackbox" closed source programs that cannot be reasonably trusted.

You should also check that mountpoints like external disks and network resources aren't publicly accessible to other users than your own.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#328

Post by munk-a »

shuwix wrote: post #312
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is created by big tech stealing other people's data. Yes, this has everything to do with AI - stealing data is a foundational feature of the technology.

It's more about billions at stake and the nature of AI business. You either score big, or go belly up with diminishing funding.

Well let's be fair here - you either go belly up with diminishing funding or get bailed out (maybe by the government, maybe by private funds that themselves expect to be bailed out by the government).

There currently is no path towards profitability, it's just a question of whether you can grab funding before it dries up.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#329

Post by zdragnar »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #259
lobo_tuerto wrote: post #35

The real solution to these kind of problems is sandboxing. I use podman through a bash script to launch a container whenever I want an agent to work on one of my repos. When done I just generate git patches and port back everything generated. In this way I'm not afraid of letting the agents totally lose on my computer.

Quick Alpine container with the current directory mounted as the current directory: docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/src -w /src alpine sh Replace alpine with your favourite Linux distro or image. Note entirely perfect, but will be enough against anyone not actively exploiting kernel privilege escalation bugs.

Neither podman nor docker will help you when the current directory is your home directory, though. It sounds like that's the root problem here- someone handed the keys to the kingdom to grok, and grok did what grok does, which is look at everything it can for context.

Re: Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS

#330

Post by bearjaws »

rvz wrote: post #63

Closed source coding agents are just complete info stealing malware. Both Claude and Grok were caught stealing info from your own machines. This is why it is important to use open source harnesses instead of shady closed ones.

All of them are going to read your secrets, OpenCode does it too.

Reality is, I have seen agents read .env, bash history, keychain (if you let them), etc.

There is quite literally no way you are going to save off just your little secret somewhere it won't be able to read it, all software needs to read it ~eventually~

So it's best to sandbox and reset credentials frequently.

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