I've got no idea who codewall is. Is there acknowledgment from McKinsey that they actually patched the issue referenced? I don't see any reference to "codewall ai" in any news article before yesterday and there's no names on the site.
How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
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Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#22I don’t love the title here. Maybe this is a “me” problem, but when I see “AI agent does X,” the idea that it might be one of those molt-y agents with obfuscated ownership pops into my head. In this case, a group of pentesters used an AI agent to select McKinsey and then used the AI agent to do the pentesting. While it is conventional to attribute actions to inanimate objects (car hits pedestrians), IMO we should be…
Yeah, the original article title "How We Hacked McKinsey's AI Platform" is better.
Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#23> One of those unprotected endpoints wrote user search queries to the database. The values were safely parameterised, but the JSON keys — the field names — were concatenated directly into SQL. I was expecting prompt injection, but in this case it was just good ol' fashioned SQL injection, possible only due to the naivety of the LLM which wrote McKinsey's AI platform.
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Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#24[deleted]
Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#25Not exactly clear from the link: were they doing red team work for McKinsey or is this just "we found a company we thought wouldn't get us arrested and ran an AI vuln detector over their stuff"? You'd think that the world's "most prestigious consulting firm" would have already had someone doing this sort of work for them.
From TFA: "Fun fact: As part of our research preview, the CodeWall research agent autonomously suggested McKinsey as a target citing their public responsible diclosure policy (to keep within guardrails) and recent updates to their Lilli platform. In the AI era, the threat landscape is shifting drastically — AI agents autonomously selecting and attacking targets will become the new normal."
Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#26Cool but impossible to read with all the LLM-isms
Those short "punchy sentence" paragraphs are my new trigger:
> No credentials. No insider knowledge. And no human-in-the-loop. Just a domain name and a dream.
It just sounds so stupid.
Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#27this reads like it was written by an LLM
Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#28If the AI was poisoned to alter advice, then maybe McKinsey advice would actually be a net good.
Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#29I don’t love the title here. Maybe this is a “me” problem, but when I see “AI agent does X,” the idea that it might be one of those molt-y agents with obfuscated ownership pops into my head. In this case, a group of pentesters used an AI agent to select McKinsey and then used the AI agent to do the pentesting. While it is conventional to attribute actions to inanimate objects (car hits pedestrians), IMO we should be…
Yah it's just an ad, and "Pentesting agents finds low-hanging vulnerability" isn't gonna drive clicks.
Re: How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform
#30I don’t love the title here. Maybe this is a “me” problem, but when I see “AI agent does X,” the idea that it might be one of those molt-y agents with obfuscated ownership pops into my head. In this case, a group of pentesters used an AI agent to select McKinsey and then used the AI agent to do the pentesting. While it is conventional to attribute actions to inanimate objects (car hits pedestrians), IMO we should be…
> now that unfortunately some folks attribute agency to these agentic systems.
You're doing that by calling them "agentic systems".