Houston, We Have a Problem: Anthropic Rides an Artificial Wave – BIML

Summary

I’ll tip my hat to the new ConstitutionTake a bow for the new revolutionSmile and grin at the change all aroundPick up my guitar and playJust like yesterdayThen I’ll get on my knees and prayWe don’t get fooled again Out there in the smoking rubble of the fourth estate, it is hard enough to cover cyber cyber. Imagine, then, piling on the AI bullshit. Can anybody cut through the haze? Apparently for the WSJ and the NY Times, the answer is no. Yeah, it’s Anthropic again. This time writing a blog-post level document titled “Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign” and getting the major tech press all wound around the axle about it. The root of the problem here is that expertise in cyber cyber is rare AND expertise in AI/ML is rare…but expertise in both fields? Not only is it rare, but like hydrogen-7, which has a half-life of about 10^-24 seconds, it disappears pretty fast as both fields progress. Even superstar tech reporters can’t keep everything straight. Lets start with the end. What question should the press have asked Anthropic about their latest security story? How about, “which parts of these attacks could ONLY be accomplished with agentic AI?” From our little perch at BIML, it looks like the answer is a resounding none. Now that we know the ending, lets look at both sides of the beginning. Security first. Unfortunately, brute force, cloud-scale, turnkey software exploit is what has been driving the ransomware cybercrime wave for at least a decade now. All of the offensive security tool technology used by the attackers Anthropic describes is available as open source frameworks, leading experts like Kevin Beaumont to label the whole thing, “vibe usage of open source attack frameworks.” Would existing controls work against this? Apparently not for “a handful” of the thirty companies Anthropic claims were successfully attacked. LOL. By now those of us old enough to know better than to call ourselves security experts have learned how t...