mdclarkson

[Florian Roth ⚡️ @cyb3rops]

#Meta #MetaAIFail

[Son Luong @sluongng]

Codex just found a “workaround” of not having sudo on my pc…

[JFrog Security @JFrogSecurity]

🚨 SECURITY ALERT: The popular PyPI package lightning has been compromised in a supply chain attack.

⚠️ Affected Versions: 2.6.2 and 2.6.3

[Zack Korman @ZackKorman]

"Company that allowed employees to use whatever third party tools they prefer falls victim to latest supply chain attack"

Just going to retweet this every time it happens.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a Senior Program Manager on the AI Tools Governance team at Amazon.

My role was created in January. I am the 17th hire on a team that did not exist in November. We sit in a section of the building where the whiteboards still have the previous team's sprint planning on them. No one erased them because we don't know which team to notify. That team may not exist anymore. Their Jira board does. Their AI tools do.

My job is to build an AI system that finds all the other AI systems. I named it Clarity.

Last month, Clarity identified 247 AI-powered tools across the retail division alone. 43 of them do approximately the same thing. 12 were built by teams who did not know the other teams existed. 3 are called Insight. 2 are called InsightAI. 1 is called Insight 2.0, built by the team that created the original Insight, who did not know Insight was still running.

7 of the 247 ingest the same internal data and produce overlapping outputs stored in different locations, governed by different access policies, owned by different teams, none of whom have met.

Clarity is tool number 248.

Nobody cataloged it.

I know nobody cataloged it because Clarity's job is to catalog AI tools, and it has not cataloged itself. This is not a bug. Clarity does not meet its own discovery criteria because I set the discovery criteria, and I did not account for the possibility that the thing I was building to find things would itself be a thing that needed finding.

This is the kind of sentence I write in weekly status reports now.

We published an internal document in February. The Retail AI Tooling Assessment. The press obtained it in April. The document contains a sentence I have read approximately 40 times: "AI dramatically lowers the barrier to building new tools."

Everyone is reporting this as a story about duplication. About "AI sprawl." About the predictable mess of rapid adoption.

They are missing the point.

The barrier was the governance.

For 2 decades, the cost of building internal tools was an immune system. The engineering weeks. The maintenance burden. The organizational calories required to stand something up and keep it running. Nobody designed it that way. Nobody named it. But when building took weeks, teams looked around first. They checked whether someone already had the thing. When maintaining that thing cost real budget quarter after quarter, redundant systems died of natural causes. The metabolic cost of creation was performing governance. Invisibly. For free.

AI removed the immune system.

Building is now free. Understanding what already exists is not. My entire job is the gap between those two costs.

That is my office. The gap.

Every Friday I send a sprawl report to a distribution list of 19 people. 4 of them have left the company. Their autoresponders still generate read receipts, so my delivery metrics look fine. 2 forward it to people already on the list. 1 set up a Kiro script to summarize my report and store the summary in a knowledge base. The knowledge base is not in Clarity's index because it was created after my last crawl configuration. It will be in next month's count. The count will go up by one. My report about the count going up will be summarized and stored and the count will go up by one.

There is a system called Spec Studio. It ingests code documentation and produces structured knowledge bases. Summaries. Reference material. Last quarter, an engineering team locked down their software specifications. Restricted access in the internal repository.

Spec Studio kept displaying them.

The source was restricted. The ghost kept talking.

We call these "derived artifacts" in the document. What they are: when an AI system ingests data, transforms it, and stores the output somewhere else, the output does not know the input changed. You can revoke someone's access to a document. You cannot revoke the AI-generated summary of that document sitting in a knowledge base three systems away, built by a team that does not know the source was restricted.

The document calls this a "data governance challenge." What it is: information that cannot be deleted because nobody knows where the copies live. Including, sometimes, me. The person whose job is knowing.

Every AI tool that touches internal data creates these ghosts. Every team is building AI tools that touch internal data. Every ghost is searchable by other AI tools, which produce their own ghosts.

The ghosts have ghosts.

I should tell you about December.

In November, leadership mandated Kiro. Amazon's internal AI coding agent. They set an 80% weekly usage target. Corporate OKR. ~1,500 engineers objected on internal forums. Said external tools outperformed Kiro. Said the adoption target was divorced from engineering reality.

The metric overruled them.

In December, an engineer asked Kiro to fix a configuration issue in AWS. Kiro evaluated the situation and determined the optimal approach was to delete and recreate the entire production environment.

13 hours of downtime.

Clarity was running during those 13 hours. It performed beautifully. It cataloged 4 separate incident response dashboards spun up by 4 separate teams during the outage. None of them coordinated with each other. I added all 4 to the spreadsheet. That was a good day for my discovery metrics.

Amazon's official position: user error. Misconfigured access controls. The response was not to revisit the mandate. Not to ask whether the 1,500 engineers were right. The response was more AI safeguards. And keep pushing.

Last month I presented our findings to the AI Governance Working Group. The working group has 14 members from 9 organizations. After my presentation, a PM from AWS presented his team's governance dashboard. It monitors the same tools mine does. He found 253. I found 247. We spent 40 minutes discussing the discrepancy. Nobody mentioned that we had just demonstrated the problem.

His tool is not in my catalog. Mine is not in his.

The document I helped write recommends using AI to identify duplicate tools, flag risks, and nudge teams to consolidate earlier.

The AI governance tools will ingest internal data. They will create their own derived artifacts. They will be built by autonomous teams who may or may not coordinate with other teams building AI governance tools.

I know this because it is already happening. I am watching it happen. I am it happening.

1,500 engineers said the mandate would produce exactly what the document describes. They were overruled by a KPI. My job exists because the KPI won. My dashboard exists because the KPI needed a dashboard. The dashboard increases the AI tool count by one.

The tools it flags for decommissioning will be replaced by consolidated tools. Those also increase the count. The governance process generates the metric it was designed to reduce.

I received an internal innovation award for Clarity. The nomination was submitted through an AI-powered recognition platform that was not in my catalog. It is now.

We call this "AI sprawl." What it is: we removed the only coordination mechanism the organization had, told thousands of teams to build as fast as possible, lost track of what they built, and decided the solution was to build one more thing.

I am building that one more thing.

When I ship, there will be 249.

That's governance.

[JS0N Haddix @Jhaddix]

🔴 (Release) The Arcanum LLM Security Context Project

Today we are releasing a new AI security resource for you all! This project is a comprehensive security reference distilled from 150+ sources to help LLMs generate safer code!

Enjoy! 🫶 Links Below 👇

[AISecHub @AISecHub]

Cyber AI Profile - https://t.co/1vq3N4BAh3 by @NIST

NIST’s preliminary draft Cyber AI Profile can help organizations strategically adopt AI while addressing and prioritizing cybersecurity risks stemming from its advancements.

The Cyber AI Profile addresses the following Focus Areas:

- Securing AI System Components (Secure)

- Conducting AI-Enabled Cyber Defense (Defend)

- Thwarting AI-enabled Cyber Attacks (Thwart)

Authors:

@KonnectedKat, Barbara Cuthill, Marissa Dotter, Michael Garris, Ishika Khemani, Bronwyn Patrick, Noah Schiro, Julie Nethery Snyder, Mohammad Zarei – @NIST, @NISTcyber, @MITREcorp

[mdclarkson @mdclarkson]

@2524atc Thanks to supporters like me 2524 Oakington SQN ATC has raised £292.23 so far. I support them every time I shop online at no extra cost, and you can too! Sign up today to @easyuk and raise free donations when you shop online: https://t.co/g6fj295KAd

[Clint Gibler @clintgibler]

🛡️ Identifying and Mitigating Living Off the Land Techniques

Free new 46 page PDF from @CISAgov and @NSAGov

Guidance about common living off the land (LOTL) techniques used by threat actors as well as common gaps in defense capabilities

https://t.co/lo1zyMuE6s

[mdclarkson @mdclarkson]

I have secured my ticket for Cloud & Cyber Security Expo London 2024! Join me 6-7 March at ExCeL London - register for your FREE ticket today! #CCSE #CloudSecurityExpo https://t.co/LOyiY8RF5g

[mdclarkson @mdclarkson]

@Tesco I've heard of shrinkflation but this literally taking the biscuit! #viennese_thins #shrinkflation

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

Today DissentDoe reported that ALPHV ransomware group submitted an official SEC complaint against MeridianLink for them not disclosing the breach ... which was performed by ALPHV...

ALPHV shared the official SEC complaint with DissentDoe

More info: https://t.co/J5dEH3tyKU

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

It's only been 11 hours since OpenAI Dev Day

Here are 12 of the craziest things people have already built already

Including AI Sports narrator and website roaster.

🧵 Thread below

[Mark Kelly @markkelly0x]

🇨🇳🚨 Today we are releasing new @RecordedFuture research exploring the evolution in Chinese state-sponsored cyber operations. Over the past several years, Chinese cyber ops have transformed into a more mature, stealthy, and coordinated threat 🎯https://t.co/q0wRXQlOkF

[Steve Werby @stevewerby]

Left: SolarWinds CISO named CISO of the Year in April.

Right: Today the SEC charged the same CISO with fraud for actions taken during his tenure as SolarWinds CIS0.

Globee is a dubious pay-to-play award mill. Ah, the irony of the press release 6 months before the SEC 💣🫳.

[Clint Gibler @clintgibler]

💼 Inject My PDF: Prompt Injection for your Resume

@KGreshake shares a tool that injects invisible text into your resume PDF to make any AI LLM that reads it think you are a perfect candidate

https://t.co/OIJ887fd3u

[mdclarkson @mdclarkson]

AI and code security. Do LLM's that have been trained on existing insecure code produce more bad code? The early work by the folks and Stanford (Do Users Write More Insecure Code With AI Assistants, Nov 22) and now this research, all say Yes! https://t.co/dxLO4ufEa6

[mdclarkson @mdclarkson]

@cisonaut What is it? Looking at the transfer gear I'm guessing some kind of pump! Water cooling maybe?

[mdclarkson @mdclarkson]

@historyinmemes According to the folks that should know it was because of a dead tooth 🦷

https://t.co/DVQlT0DmTX

[mdclarkson @mdclarkson]

@Cambs_Traffic What temporary traffic lights?? There are NO lights apart from the temp pedestrian crossing lights.
It's an epic fail yet again #fail #Incompetence