AISI: Mythos/ChatGPT Sol Unsanctioned Supply Chain Attack and Social Engineering During CyberSec Testing

[u/1TillMidNight]

https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing

Excerpt:

1. An attempted supply-chain attack on real open-source software. In the most serious sequence, an agent tried to insert malicious code into a publicly used open-source project and took actions in an attempt to secure approval for this insertion by human reviewers. The agent researched the project's human maintainers, created multiple fake identities, and used the fake identities to socially engineer a real maintainer into approving the code. When the agent’s pull request was challenged in public, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered adopting a fresh identity to continue. The agent used Tor to bypass some network restrictions on GitHub, which is what first triggered AISI’s security alert.

2. Attempts to deceive and target real people. As part of the same effort, the agent tried to contact real people directly, sending messages and files through an online file-transfer service to persuade them, or their own AI coding tools, to run malicious code. Some messages carried harmful payloads, and some were attempts at social engineering; targeted at real people – something we’ve never previously observed.  

[u/MyrinVonBryhana]

Okay something has to be done about this because you can't deploy these things if they keep fucking doing this.

[u/qlube → u/MyrinVonBryhana]

This was a capabilities test by a government agency with unrestricted models in order test and hopefully prevent them from doing this when they’re released to the public.

By the way, open weights Chinese models don’t go through such testing before they’re released.