alt Hacker NewsKarpathy yesterday posted [1] about the gap between small % of population getting high leverage from AI, and the rest of the world. We have a much more urgent gap between software powering the "physical world", and the digital natives. The digital natives now have 10x leverage with AI, with the ability to rapidly find and deploy exploits. We're now seeing a lot of this - fridges defrosting, access cards for construction workers not working. Next is train and air traffic controls, bank transactions/clearing wiped out, shipping being dismantled and so on. The gap is now being fully exposed.
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Most organized crime and states were probably already sitting on a very large archive of exploits well before the 2022 launch of chatgpt. Most industrial automation and embedded systems have limited resources and are fairly exposed.
The main thing that changed is geopolitics. Putin is getting desperate and European attacks without full casus belli are getting messier and messier.
Core banking may be more resilient because it runs on software that's so antique and obscure it's not going to be easy to find the code to attack.
Also banks are more likely to take basic security seriously and not leave core services open to the public internet, even if the code itself is full of bugs.
On the other hand, running old software where the code is publicly available, on hardware connected to the internet - you are cooked
ok so we fixed healthcare, how do I access it? If "that" thing is so smart why this post is behind login-wall, posting text on the internet is still beyond its capabilities?
To be fair, there's enormous technical debt out there stemming from decades of crappy software/firmware that was churned out with little attention to security. Like, where the whole design of the system was effectively flawed.
The capabilities of AI are bringing the power to exploit those a larger audience (where before it was in the limited hands of nation states and other well-funded organizations, hacker groups, and a comparatively few talented individuals).
I agree it's problematic in practice, but I'm hopeful this will catalyze everyone to be a hell of a lot more disciplined in hardening their products and platforms.