PHP, TLS, etc… We appear to be facing a tsunami of vulnerabilities being discovered in record time. Further, the window to act on these vulnerabilities has basically closed to zero; hackers’ tools now automatically fold the very latest vulnerabilities into their botnets within minutes/hours of discovery. I have always been extremely reluctant to expose any of my services - even with the latest and greatest security tools. My choice to stay totally within the confines of tailscale seems vindicated given this week’s news. How are you all taking this?
https://www.ibm.com/think/x-force/ai-vulnerability-discovery
Your head’s in the sand, friend.
I have no idea what you are on about. What do you want me to do? Turn the internet off? Lock my doors and not leave the house? Sit here crying and quivering because the world is gonna end? My head is deffo not in the sand, I’m looking out the window at the rain, enjoying my life, looking forward to tomorrow.
I’m not worried about my web server any more today then I was last year. It’s a web server, it’s not me or my life, yes it how important stuff, but if the world ends it’ll be the last thing I think of.
My web server is as safe as it needs to be. Thanks for your concern.
There’s a world of possibilities between “public facing server” and “turn the internet off”. Like using a VPN or mTLS. Or only connecting when you are at home.
However it sounds like you aren’t worried about the increased threat landscape, or at least aren’t willing to compromise on your current level of convenience. That is a fair answer to OP’s question.
To me there is no increased threat landscape. The world is a scary place, full of baddies trying to get you. Since the dawn of the internet there has been vulnerabilities being found and used maliciously. Just because the big tech sota models are shouting about how great they are by finding them, giving them some nice free marketing, doesn’t mean that much has changed.
Ok, ai has increased the frequency and amount being found, but that is equally increased both for malicious and cybersec, so it essentially cancels out.
My server is public facing and secure, so that both myself, family and friends can use it, especially for the less tech savvy.
This is not what experts are saying.
https://therecord.media/ai-set-to-help-attackers-more-than-defenders
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/blog/why-incident-response-demand-will-grow-faster-than-expected
https://matthew-rosenquist.medium.com/why-cyber-attackers-benefit-more-from-ai-technology-than-defenders-98efd14ac664
You’re determined that I worry about my public server aren’t you? Your initial question wasn’t actually a question, but just a trap for you to lure me into to be converted to your way of thinking?!?! rumbled! 😂 There are always experts to quote for any argument. Personally, I don’t feel any more vulnerable than before ai decimated the security landscape.
It’s really not the publicly disclosed vulnerabilities you need to worry about. Most of those vulnerabilities have existed for years - the recent php thing is supposedly 12 years old. Maybe someone’s been out there exploiting it for 12 years.
The people who have sought and exploited vulnerabilities since computers went online don’t disclose what they find. They are the people who should be most worried about AI-assisted vulnerability research, because it directly attacks their business model.
10000% correct! I bet the NSA or KGB has had that PHP exploit for close to a decade and they are gutted its finally been patched! There are probably an infinite number of vulnerabilities in currently running servers and clients, a few 100 will already be known and being quietly exploited. Yes, ai will find some completely unknown ones for malicious actors, but it will also find those same ones for cybersec bods, so effectively cancel each other out.
Do security companies like cloudflare go back and look for past exploitation of vulnerabilities that were recently found by the public? I can’t think of any “we found this new vuln and turns out someone has been exploiting it for years” stories.
Maybe not, but maybe, just maybe, the people with these exploits aren’t running round attacking Joe bloggs personal photo album server to steal some photos, but in fact are only using the exploit very carefully and sparingly so as not to be detected, and only targeting high value and highly confidential services, where even if they were hacked or a specific exploit was deployed, either are too big to notice, or to proud to divulge the fact they lost some data 🤷