w(o|ei)rd machines @umbriel_ai

Joined October 2009
1/ Agentic LLMs can automate vuln detection. Very exciting, but doesn't address the hardest part (imo) of vuln research: prioritization. Can we reliably explore the search space and separate signal from noise? I wrote a paper (and OSS tool) to solve this. arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06155
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turingtest++: has an LLM ever made you laugh out loud? not just *forceful nasal exhale*. I've challenged various LLMs to write lol-worthy jokes and they fall completely flat. but perhaps "surprise" requires an external conscious entity. like how you can't tickle yourself.
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but I suppose I regularly laugh at my own jokes so maybe the tickle comparison doesn't apply
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The first rule of cybersecurity is to have fun and be yourself
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is he referencing the php vulns? the gitlab vuln? or maybe the CA compromise?
Today I turn 88…I’ve seen some serious shit. The most serious of it all is love. I love my family, my friends, and my wonderful fans. The power of love remains.
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Caleb Gross retweeted
You okay babe? You’ve barely touched your botnet of zombie PHP servers
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Caleb Gross retweeted
Let’s set the record straight: @lcfr_hax was the first to discover php2shell and develop a working exploit. See his August 5 tweet: xitter.cf/lcfr_hax/status/208503… His work convinced the PHP Foundation to invest in fixing this entire bug class. He then worked around the clock to review, test, and retest the patches.
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Caleb Gross retweeted
Attack surface reduction is the one thing that reliably works.
Reducing the attack surface of deployed services and apps is a fundamental component of software that is secure by design. Earlier this year we tasked Claude with autonomously mapping and reducing the attack surface of 25 large and widely used OSS codebases. This blog post covers some of our methodology and a preview of the data we collected. This research resulted in a significant reduction in OpenSSH pre-authentication attack surface (now fixed in 10.6). And over 500 findings where reachability could be reduced and configurations hardened to ensure security controls weren’t silently disabled. anthropic.com/research/attac…
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Caleb Gross retweeted
Just watched the @netflix Instadocs about the @OpenAI cyberattack on @huggingface. Super disappointing, as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and full doomer mode. I spent more than two hours with them trying to correct all their mistakes and ground this in reality, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens. But it looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong. Also, they didn’t mention the lack of containment and monitoring of the agents, how closed-model safeguards blocked our defensive work, or how we defended ourselves with AI using an open model. And that we still lack a lot of information and transparency, including full agent traces and that companies need to remain accountable for what their agents do. It ends up being a fun sci-fi movie though!
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did we just blow right past pocpocalypse?
Transition from vulpocalypse to breachpocalypse is here. IR firms are saturated & turning away work. Now one hacker unleashed AI agents on 1,200+ websites, compromising 100+ for ~$5,000 in tokens. $50 per hack. Agents won and compromised targets. reuters.com/legal/government…
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I found two Windows 0-days with a frontier model, the first in 76 minutes. Then I replayed the same hunt on Qwen, DS4, GLM and more. How much frontier capability survives on local models, and how much human direction does it take? “To the Frontier and Back Again” @UnpromptedAU
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pumped to get to work with @clearbluejar 🙌 I've been following John's work for years, including ghidriff which was instrumental in early versions of siftrank experimentation
Excited to welcome John Mcintosh (@clearbluejar) to the Umbriel research team!! Going to be awesome :). Btw check out his recent presentation at @UnpromptedAU !!
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glad to have troubleshat extensively before the advent of agentic ai
Outsourcing your complete ability to troubleshoot is going to be a problem. xitter.cf/rootsud0/status/211187…
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Caleb Gross retweeted
Context about how I got CVE-2026-99999: it wasn't assigned by incrimental luck. There were nearly 2k unassigned CVEs before it. The Linux maintainers felt it deserved the special number because of impact+new attack surface for KVM escapes and offered it. It was a prize! I was just telling someone it feels like graduation from cybersecurity. So yeah it's intentionally assigned, and I'll be eternally grateful for it.
How can one obtain such a great identifier as CVE-2026-99999? #PwnEscape
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Caleb Gross retweeted
Just found out about recency bias. Maybe the most important bias ever
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Caleb Gross retweeted
As a treat, Claude also reverse engineered the NBS's 1977 DES S-box test vectors and determined that it was generated on a PDP-11 Unix V6 using rand() .
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if you're bug hunting and want to locate repos where no human author has a well-formed mental model of how the whole system works, you might want to search git commit history for this string 😈
I usually interpret "Co-Authored-By: <AGENT>" to mean "no human laid eyes on this code at any point"
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I usually interpret "Co-Authored-By: <AGENT>" to mean "no human laid eyes on this code at any point"
"Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5" is giving me far too much credit.
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"Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5" is giving me far too much credit.
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