man, the whole php2shell discourse is incredibly frustrating.
1. people claimed vendors were exaggerating the vulnerability and that it was practically hard to exploit.
2. they pointed to the unclaimed wallet in stealmybitcoin as "ground truth" supporting that argument.
3. except apparently nobody bothered to check how badly configured the challenge was in the first place.
what annoys me is how confidently people, including security professionals, jumped on the bandwagon to declare the vulnerability overhyped based on a challenge that wasn't even properly working.
like, think about whose narrative is actually more dangerous here.
the vendor saying php2shell is reliably exploitable and urging people to patch, or someone pointing to a broken challenge as "ground truth" that the vulnerability is overhyped and practically hard to exploit?
i agree it's hard to exploit without a frontier model or a highly skilled operator using capable open models. not everyone has access to either, and that could partly explain why we aren't seeing widespread exploitation.
but does that really change how we should think about patching?
you can reasonably assume well resourced threat actors have access to frontier models and talent to repro. they're not necessarily doing amateur spray and pray attacks, right? they probably have specific targets, and can afford to spend hours adapting an exploit to those environments.
i don't think you're explicitly telling people not to patch. but using an unsolved, badly configured challenge as evidence that the vulnerability is overhyped can give people false confidence and lead them to delay patching.
hashcat v8.0.0 released!
The largest update in the history of hashcat, with PCFG attacks, hash recipes that crack hashes without a hash-mode, and bcrypt on FPGA boards.
Release notes: https://t.co/0ffrO586PJ
Download: https://t.co/Grn4jZmAWr
As an iOS dev, I never imagined I'd be creating a native app on the iPhone/iPad itself — no Xcode, no Cloud server, no Remote session.
Introduce a new Minis Skill: ios-dev(C/ObjC only now). Compile, self-sign, install, launch, read logs — all of it happens on-device.
The demo: one prompt, 10 minutes, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash shipped "Voicemore", a Typeless-style voice input app. Although The UI is rough, the logic is buggy — but it was compiled, signed, installed and it really runs: you speak, and the words appear.
That's the part that still feels like magic. ✨
Skill Link:
https://t.co/cnLWljm4Mm
Back in 2021 I interviewed at Vercel and I failed badly.
I couldn’t implement a debounce function and was stuck for like 30 minutes. It was pretty embarrassing.
10 months later (2022) I interviewed again and got the job.
Don’t give up!
i think intuitively cyber is fundamentally offense dominant, but let me put my money where my mouth is.
want to wager? by the end of 2028, i’ll concede if we formally verify most of the critical software we rely on like chromium, firefox, the linux kernel, nginx, next.js, and apache.
not even asking about composition or applications built on top of them, just the core software, including every dependency.
alternative wager, maybe for you and @JasonDClinton frontier labs have absurd amounts of tokens. by the end of 2028, if they formally verify every dependency that codex or claude code relies on(note agent actions should be part of the spec), including cloud infrastructure, desktop clients, and their servers, i’ll concede.
actually, a much more arrogant wager, i would bet that even after 2028, me, my team, or some other security researcher will still find a software vulnerability that compromises a critical asset at vercel or anthropic and responsibly disclose it.
i’d love to lose this bet.
Introducing Yeta inference platform - cheap, fast access to uncensored LLMs and uncensored video models.
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Powered by ❤️ and GPU from Indonesia & Malaysia.
Researcher A discovers a critical vulnerability using IDA and pwntools → This is recognized as Researcher A’s technical achievement, made possible by their ability to effectively use the right tools 🎉
Researcher A discovers a critical vulnerability using an LLM → This is also Researcher A’s technical achievement, made possible by their ability to effectively apply the right heuristics and tools. So why is it that, in this case, people say the discovery was only possible because of the LLM or the harness? 🤣
Simply using an LLM doesn’t change who deserves credit for the technical achievement. of course, LLMs can enable researchers to achieve performance or speed improvements that were previously impossible, sometimes by 5x or even 10x
But when an extremely difficult, critical vulnerability is discovered, I believe the credit should go not to the LLM itself, but to the human researcher who skillfully directed it