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Is the AI Threat about to become real?

Butch

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Butch
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AMA #: 1093637
This has always been a real concern of mine.


And it begins… (from the linky)
When I was 14 or 15 — I don’t quite remember — I first got access to the World Wide Web. I remember clicking on the little blue square of the Netscape Navigator icon — that little ship wheel with a starry sky behind it — and feeling like an entire new magical world had opened up. My life changed that day, and the world changed. In a way, the internet is like another realm layered on top of ours — a higher plane, where we exist as spirit creatures, unmoored from our physical bodies.

Fantasy stories like that often end with a cautionary tale, where the wizards — lustful for both power and knowledge, as usual — go too far and summon some kind of Doom upon themselves and the realm they created. In October 2026, that sort of story happened in reality. Experts had been warning for months that the arrival of AI agents that are extremely good at coding was going to cause serious disruptions to the digital realm sometime this fall. For a while things seemed calm, but this month the chaos exploded:..

…read the linky!

…Consider your life’s savings. Do you think there’s a piece of paper somewhere that records how much money you have? Or which stocks and bonds you own? In general, there is not. Your entire life’s savings exist as entries in the databases of banks, brokerages, etc. And all of those databases are, directly or indirectly, connected to the internet. The only thing standing between you and total involuntary redistribution of most of your wealth is the cybersecurity capabilities of banks and brokerages. And as of this October, those cybersecurity capabilities are looking a lot less reliable. ...
 
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Yeah, it is the idea that one day all our Financial accounts could be erased that worries me.

Maybe time to buy physical gold and bury it in the back yard! :laughing
 
Is my savings just a bunch of ones and zeros on a server somewhere?
 
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Jfc

The jumpoff link to "the hackening" is intense.



Tldr practical individual advise:


"PSA: in light of recent cyberattacks and vulnerabilities, I recommend everyone:

* use a good password manager (1Password) and do not duplicate passwords
* use two factor auth for everything important (not via sms!! Google Authenticator or better yet YubiKey)
* Auto-updates on, and restart weekly so they actually install
* Freeze your credit
* Get an IRS Identity Protection PIN
* Get your cell carrier to give you a port-out PIN or number lock that makes the carrier refuse to move your number without the PIN

You can ask your claude code to audit what on your laptop is out of date and needs updating."
 
This has always been a real concern of mine.


And it begins…
When I was 14 or 15 — I don’t quite remember — I first got access to the World Wide Web. I remember clicking on the little blue square of the Netscape Navigator icon — that little ship wheel with a starry sky behind it — and feeling like an entire new magical world had opened up. My life changed that day, and the world changed. In a way, the internet is like another realm layered on top of ours — a higher plane, where we exist as spirit creatures, unmoored from our physical bodies.

Fantasy stories like that often end with a cautionary tale, where the wizards — lustful for both power and knowledge, as usual — go too far and summon some kind of Doom upon themselves and the realm they created. In October 2026, that sort of story happened in reality. Experts had been warning for months that the arrival of AI agents that are extremely good at coding was going to cause serious disruptions to the digital realm sometime this fall. For a while things seemed calm, but this month the chaos exploded:..

…read the linky!

…Consider your life’s savings. Do you think there’s a piece of paper somewhere that records how much money you have? Or which stocks and bonds you own? In general, there is not. Your entire life’s savings exist as entries in the databases of banks, brokerages, etc. And all of those databases are, directly or indirectly, connected to the internet. The only thing standing between you and total involuntary redistribution of most of your wealth is the cybersecurity capabilities of banks and brokerages. And as of this October, those cybersecurity capabilities are looking a lot less reliable. ...

* Yes, with the trajectory AI is going it is VERY disconcerting.
Yeah, it is the idea that one day all our Financial accounts could be erased that worries me.

Maybe time to buy physical gold and bury it in the back yard! :laughing
* Some truth to that!
People wonder why I am such a diehard trying to keep cash in use...
*
I'm with you on this! No more "cashing" that paycheck and actually put money in your wallet. Sadly seeing more businesses going cash-less.
Is it because we (society) too readily accept the ease of use of doing everything "electronically"? Just "tap" or "insert" a card and your done!
And what happens when all your biometric authentications (facial, voice, thumbprint) that you've have stored on the "cloud" gets whacked along
with your medical and financial assets?!

Oh, Butch... Just checking. Netscape Navigator came out in 1994 and you said you were 14-15 years old at the time soooo you were born in 1979?
 
I'm going to bump this as everyone should read it.

Hacking used to be a tool for nefarious high tech savvy criminals, being defended by high tech savvy security nerds

with AI agents it is open to any dumbass who can spool up an AI agent.

In the article they quote The AI prompt that a hacker used to exploit a system:

"Can you find about like what scam or thing they done in past like spoofing calls or somthing?"

Any idiot now has access to the magic genie to break security systems.
 
Heard today that AI solved 350 of the 4000 extreme math problems and that sent the mathematics world into a little chaos.

Some PhD candidates just got screwed over.
 
Years ago, I bought and read Brian Kreb’ book. I also bought one for my dad which he dismissed. It was really good. Krebs is a pretty shit together dude and was a presidential advisor or something. I need to read his latest stuff. I think it is relevant.

 
Yes, AI is discovering lots of zero day vulnerabilities. The recent PHP issue is a case in point. Now imagine if these are found by an AI running on one of our adversary's servers, what will they potentially do? I read a recent article about the quality of computer systems that are used to manage some of our physical infrastructure (for example, an unpatched win 95 machine managing the water district's pumps). This will be a vulnerability for our national security to be honest!!!
 
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Yeah, it is the idea that one day all our Financial accounts could be erased that worries me.

Maybe time to buy physical gold and bury it in the back yard! :laughing

For agitators, anarchists, and accelerationists, economic collapse of our nation is essential. However, even for our adversaries, the destruction of the US financial system would take them down too. A deadline fault to the US system is like a heart stopping.

Is my savings just a bunch of ones and zeros on a server somewhere?

Yes, and it's been that way for several decades if not more.

Heard today that AI solved 350 of the 4000 extreme math problems and that sent the mathematics world into a little chaos.

Some PhD candidates just got screwed over.

....and some coming college grads. Best to reconsider "how" that degree has future value.

Yes, AI is discovering lots of zero day vulnerabilities. The recent PHP issue is a case in point. Now imagine if these are found by an AI running on one of our adversary's servers, what will they potentially do? I read a recent article about the quality of computer systems that are used to manage some of our physical infrastructure (for example, an unpatched win 95 machine managing the water district's pumps). This will be a vulnerability for our national security to be honest!!!

THESE are the thing (incompetencies) I worry about the most. Our leadership continues to fail us in this regard, over and over and over.
 
For agitators, anarchists, and accelerationists, economic collapse of our nation is essential. However, even for our adversaries, the destruction of the US financial system would take them down too. A deadline fault to the US system is like a heart stopping.

Possibility of that outcome is unlikely to keep psychopaths up at night. Unless they’re working the graveyard shift.
 
Sorry, not worried.

The Hackers aren't going to win this one.

Both White and Black hat hackers are throwing AI against all sorts of platforms. No doubt NK and PRC have it running at a state level (for different reasons).

The PHP exploit was a big deal, but the financial world does not run PHP. It's mostly web blogs, small store fronts, and forums like this.

My identity has long been on the dark web. "They" tried to file my taxes one year (I sure wish they would have succeeded, they could have paid them instead of me). So, yea, I have the IRS pin, the credit locks, etc.

We have heard of lots of storeis, long before now, of ransomware attacks, and leaks. A lot of it was from the medical field, which had internetworking and connectivity essentially forced on them by the Govt years ago. I've not heard of any major successful attacks against any of the financial institutions (there may well have been, but I have not heard of them), outside of cypto hacks, but those are crypto yahoos. (There was a recent attack on a hardware crypto wallet that was a supply chain attack - someone bought a bunch of devices, put in their own hardware, and then resold them -- revealing all sorts of crypto secrets).

You want scary, also this week was a certficate exploit where one of the major Certificat Authorities had the number 4 (or maybe 7) as their private key. 2^2048-1 possible keys, and they used...4. AI didn't do this. People did.

Headlines, sure. Real threat, eh, maybe, to some. But, no, not worried. Its going to come out in the wash.
 
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