Straumli blight?
Wrong zone.
U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#22I'm reminded of the universal computer viruses of Steve Barnes' SF stories, which ended up infecting people too.
Doesn't Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash have a similar idea? IIRC, a computer infects human brains via language and sound.
In the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series, the explanation for why the Galactica was the only ship that survived a massive Cylon attack seems more and more likely. The ship was old and wasn't fully connected to the human's command and control systems and so the Cylon virus couldn't reach it.
Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#23Did people doubt that this was theoretically possible? Seems self-evident to me. The interesting thing will be seeing it in the real world rather than in a controlled environment where they deliberately made all devices on the network have a known vulnerability.
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Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#24The academic paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03811 It's not fully described how things work exactly, but apparently it does not transfer entire LLMs as part of the worm. Now that would be interesting :)
The abstract says:
> The worm parasitically uses compromised machines to run open-weight large language models (LLMs) to sustain its reasoning, or extend its reach for further attacks.
Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#25ANY online device? Even assuming AI can find vulnerabilities in every operating system, there's no indication that this is actually true beyond a "here's how it could work"
This is the same nonsense that lead to article saying researchers had created a wormhole when all they had done was draw one.
I have a microcontroller with an ROM disk (i.e., physically read only). You're telling me that an AI can find a way around the physics of not being able to mutate ROM and exploit it?
Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#26The academic paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03811 It's not fully described how things work exactly, but apparently it does not transfer entire LLMs as part of the worm. Now that would be interesting :)
When the worm makes someone's machine start to sound like a leaf blower, you are found out.
Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#27You cannot possibly be a full-time academic and your last name be "Papernot"!
Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#28The academic paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03811 It's not fully described how things work exactly, but apparently it does not transfer entire LLMs as part of the worm. Now that would be interesting :)
The abstract says: > The worm parasitically uses compromised machines to run open-weight large language models (LLMs) to sustain its reasoning, or extend its reach for further attacks.
Thanks for pointing that out. I scanned the paper and found that in their main experiments, they use a shared GPU resource and do not copy LLMs to target machines. Apparently they did other experiments in the ablation study where they did copy LLMs.
So it's even worse than I expected. The intended worm can spread through my thermostat, and when it reaches a GPU host, it can spread even harder. Fun times ahead.
Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#29Next up: Obvious pattern of using ai to replace human reasoning in a proven methodology of malware distribution, C&C, and network infiltration obviously possible, say researchers. Researchers use AI to create the torment nexus using commodity hardware, demonstrating the very real threat that AI could enable attackers to create torment nexus nodes using commodity hardware. “It wasn’t even that hard !“ says one researc…
this is part of the pro-active security loop. gotta demonstrate how it can break to figure out how to defend it. our other choice is to let someone else figure it out in relative secrecy. then theyre able to cause a bunch of damage to a wide range of systems. with no defences for it. everyone would be scrambling around figuring out how to deal with it while the damage is going on. not good.
I’m totally onboard with (and an adamant user of) proactive security. But there are classes of threats that are obviously possible, and the -concept- does not need validation.
Now , a control anchored experiment with balanced and unbalanced attacker/defender LLMs, that would be instructive and useful.
The idea that an LLM can deploy other LLMs on a machine it has access to is not research. Neither is the idea that an LLM can autonomously infiltrate and expand its access over a network. I have already done both, and it’s literally just a couple of prompts and a pile of reference docs. I use LLMs to deploy LLMs on my infrastructure, and I use LLMs to analyze security vulnerabilities on my networks, including deployment of access ladders on vulnerable machines. That is SOP, not research.
If they had used a pair of identical experiments, one that was exposed to an infiltrator LLM, and the other occupied by a defensive LLM and then exposed to the same threat, that would be an actual experiment.
As it is they just threw a roadflare on a dry field, and yup, Dry fields burn. They at least could have done it with and without recent rain.
They published only the obvious and dangerous part, none of the hypothetical or potentially useful part. Low effort, rush to publish.
Re: U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
#30I made a tiny ai bug hunting harness (The intended purpose is not to be used as a worm but it does not take a genius to figure out that with small modifications such a thing could work relatively well - especially if it uses AI keys from compromised targets. Making the agent self-modifiable is relatively straightforward task and in fact I already did that in another project.