logoalt Hacker News

heliumterayesterday at 4:52 PM2 repliesview on HN

Someone trusted prod database to an llm and db got deleted.

This person should never be trusted with computers ever again for being illiterate


Replies

rahoulbyesterday at 4:58 PM

If the account is to be believed that's not what happened. They asked the LLM to do something on the staging environment, it chose to delete a staging volume using an API key that it found. But the API key was generated for something else entirely and should not have been scoped to allow volume deletions - and the volume deletion took out the production database too.

The LLM broke the safety rules it had been given (never trust an LLM with dangerous APIs). *But* they say they never gave it access to the dangerous API. Instead the API key that the LLM found had additional scopes that it should not have done (poster blames Railway's security model for this) and the API itself did more than was expected without warnings (again blaming Railway).

show 4 replies
flaminHotSpeedoyesterday at 4:56 PM

What makes you say that? The article is pretty clear that they had the llm working in a staging environment, then it decided to use some other creds it found which (unbeknownst to the author) had broad access to their prod environment.