Ilya Lichtenstein

Our investigators are observing never-seen-before laundering patterns with the stolen funds from the Binance exploit. Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds. Rather than simply moving funds onward, they repeatedly circulate them among addresses, often sending funds back to addresses involved earlier in the sequence. Read more: chainalysis.com/blog/binance…

Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified. The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B. We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far. Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company’s funds. User funds are safe. We will also publish an updated Proof of Reserves once the remediation is complete. As an immediate precaution, Binance has: - temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while security checks are completed; - revoked the affected address authorisation; - engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence partners to trace and recover funds. Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this issue safely and thoroughly. We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice. Please rely only on official Binance channels for updates. Please feel free to contact Binance Customer Support if you have any further questions. binance.com/en/support/annou…

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Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse. We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures. It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding. A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent. Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it. [Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]

This is insane. We cannot allow AI agents to go into your bank account and act independently without your authorization. But that is what’s happening right now. Left unchecked, AI could endanger the entire global financial system — including your bank account. Pause AI NOW!

as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)

The actual prompt for this was "let's look for pre-auth RCEs in PHP". I'm sharing this so people know this stuff is real and to take agent-assisted scanning seriously. I kicked if off using Claude Mythos 5.1 (in stock Claude Code) but it uses a skill to drive a harness we built over the last few months. I don't know if the harness is amazing, but it certainly has a scary track record so far. It's setup to do an agent guided tree search across a codebase, and runs in microvm sandboxes that all have the full source code for the target, as well as the source for any transitive dependencies. When I built the harness I basically just fed Claude a bunch of Project Zero blog posts describing how they did research and had it build a harness that ran like that, but on our tech stack. The first phase is just setup and can run with any model, it just does that fetching and assembles the kit environment, and gets a target up and running alongside the source code. Then we just do some basic suspend/resume stuff over to the hunt phase, where one agent supervises the tree, and the first node kicks off. Each node is context-aware and aware of the work of all the others. I think I ran this with parallelism 4? So 4 running at any one time. The supervisor can shape the tree and boost nodes or prune. Any node can add more below it with targeted instructions. A typical run looks like the first node doing a codebase review or building and running a fuzzer or something, all depending on the target. Then based on whatever it finds, it'll queue 4-5 children that go look into those areas. The main system guidance is to validate everything 3 times in clean VMs, and we typically require full exploit chains/POCs. Here's what this run looked like. We're doing this with a bunch of other open source projects now and companies. We're doing a lot of this for free, even with private companies, across critical infrastructure. We're directly partnered with Anthropic, and can do this even if you don't have direct access to a frontier model yourself.

We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent. It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.

We replicated today's PHP session exploit. Disabling sessions does not prevent it. We took our servers offline until PHP releases the patch. Every host should do the same. Especially WPorg. The forced autoupdate backdoor reaches every site and grows more severe every day. If their systems get compromised, any major plugin can be wiped off the face of Earth within 3 hours.

Okay, since the news is already out: an RCE vulnerability in PHP core, CVSS 10.0. Further details are scheduled for release on October 20. Only PHP 8 will receive patches.

It is becoming f*cking dangerous A 23-year-old dev from China just ran 300 Claude Code agents in parallel and hooked them to a verification layer so none of them could bullshit him He opens the live dashboard: - 300 agents writing and checking at the same time - Every output verified against the source in ~100 ms - Three passes over 100 company profiles → zero errors left - Everything dumped straight into an Obsidian vault The trick is the split: one model does the work, a cheaper one decides if the claim is actually true. The loop doesn’t stop until everything checks out An analyst team would bill weeks for this. He got it in one run Same kind of Second Brain + swarm setup that keeps circulating. Bookmark the full breakdown

While I do expect cyber attacks to rise it's worth knowing that if you are an AI savvy person who was considering doing cybercrime for money, just doing AI for money is far more lucrative. Many things are like this.

We’ve committed to having evaluators assess our safety practices. We're in discussions with multiple organizations, and have now given employee-like access to a team from @METR_Evals. In this post, we describe how we work with third-party evaluators: anthropic.com/news/an-update…

We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing and we will continue to support their work. At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated. We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.