Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

https://github.com/bikini/exploitarium

by binyu • 25 days ago

951 385 25 days ago

github.com

functionmouse• 25 days ago

we have got to stop putting our bank accounts and SSNs on computers

gnerd00• 25 days ago

... support cash, tell your neighbors

JohnMakin• 25 days ago

til you get debanked

Cider9986• 25 days ago

And Monero for online.

ryandrake2• 25 days ago

We need our infrastructure to stop treating bank account numbers and social security numbers as secrets. At least in the US, bank account numbers appear on physical checks and are required to be shared in order to do an ACH transfer, and a social security number is not supposed to be used as an identifier (unless to the Social Security Administration itself) or as a secret password.

Ideally, nothing nefarious should happen if both of them were listed and queryable publicly.

derektank2• 25 days ago

It’s quite ridiculous that we haven’t been able to build a modern identification system capable of replacing SSNs in the last 30 years.

silversmith• 25 days ago

Hang on, can you actually do something nefarious with just the bank account number?

pixel_popping• 25 days ago

Firewalled VM, locked-in keyboard/mouse, 1 query to any agent and it's setup.

dgellow• 25 days ago

You all need a better system than US SSNs

DANmode5• 25 days ago

You can buy your SSN for $6-$10.

smsm426• 25 days ago

Your SSN had been already stolen in the Equifax breach - unless you're so young or recently arrived that you haven't had SSN by then, in which case it had been stolen in one of a dozens of the breaches since then. And if somehow you avoided all that, it will be stolen in the inevitable next breach, which would happen regardless of what you do.

merelydev4• 25 days ago

Most of the exploits are for opensource/free software.

I don't know what methods where used to find these exploits but I am starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing in this day and age, where someone can just let bots loose on your codebase.

serf• 25 days ago

llms are fantastic disassembly partners, they're quite good at labeling functions from various dissassemblers -- the net losses from losing the benefits of open source , imo , outweigh the protection afforded by hiding your source code in yet another layer that is more and more easily unrolled through automated procedures.

spongebobstoes• 25 days ago

disassembly only applies to client side software

something like nginx could arguably be more secure if it was closed source

(I am a proponent of and contributor to open source)

blensor• 25 days ago

And isn't it also mostly a transitioning issue. Those open codebases will be constantly scanned for potential security issues and getting more and more hardened. There are probably a lot of easy wins that are going to be discovered over the next few years but it should taper out after a while.

andai2• 25 days ago

I was thinking the only obscurity now is when the program is sitting on the other side of a network. (And has very strict rate limiting?)

maxloh• 25 days ago

Open source is a good thing, but I don't think what you are proposing is accurate.

A different way to frame this would be that those bugs would never be surfaced or exploited if the software were proprietary.

derektank2• 25 days ago

Presumably, one could let the bots loose on your own codebase first. The question is one of financing of course. If your end users are enterprises willing to pay for a support contract, they probably care enough about not getting hacked to endure the higher prices that would let you throw enough tokens at the problem. Other open-source projects might have a harder time.

grayhatter7• 25 days ago

I don't know what methods where used to find these exploits but I am starting to think security through obscurity might not be a bad thing in this day and age, where someone can just let bots loose on your codebase.

I'd love to hear why you think obscurity is bad, if you now think maybe it's good in the LLM age?

I'd also be interested if you could describe exactly what or how you think security through obscurity works, or doesn't?

I've been thinking a lot about how to better teach this concept, so I'm looking to understand exactly how everyone thinks/understands how it currently works, or should work, or what it should do. I don't care about the "correct" answer, (I have ddg too :P) I'm interested in general expectations from SWE's that I might teach at work, instead of opinions of security eng speaking about theory.

merelydev4• 25 days ago

"one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them" - Claude Shannon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

GTP7• 25 days ago

Security through obscurity can make something a bit more secure in practice by annoying an attacker IF AND ONLY IF you're not relying on the hidden information remaining secret in order to the system remaining secure. E.g., if you're using a broken cipher and assume this is ok because no one knows which cipher you're using, you're gonna have a bad time.

In the case of FOSS software, it is generally recognized that the small advantage of keeping the source secret is far outweighted by the contributions and vuln reports you get if you publish the source.

IshKebab• 25 days ago

I think LLMs might actually have a bigger effect on closed source software - the tedium saved on open source bug hunting is significant, but on closed source software the tedium of finding bugs is extreme because of all the reverse engineering, but LLMs will chew through that. So there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit.

Gigachad• 25 days ago

Because pretty much all server software is open source. Hackers only care about attacking stuff that’s exposed to the network.

michael-ax• 24 days ago

aha

Tiberium• 25 days ago

Are they all actually 0-day? I think a lot of them are from disclosed CVEs/code that were already fixed upstream. It often seems like the term "0-day" has lost most of its meaning today and people often use it to refer to any exploits.

tempest_• 25 days ago

Repo claims

A single archive of public exploit PoCs and vulnerability research writeups. At the time I post these, none have been reported. Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz. Please do not abuse these. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I've always found this is the most efficient way.

Which is roughly the definition of zero day. Whether the contents of the repo reflect the above claim is something else entirely.

tyre3• 25 days ago

Please do not abuse these.

Reminds me of Jamie Wolf's joke about bestiality laws. Who are those for? What stops most people from bestiality is… not wanting to have sex with animals! For people who do want to, what, they won't because of… the law??

Who will this comment stop??

pooploop64• 25 days ago

RCE has no meaning either in these situations. The "remote" part is usually an ssh root session if it means anything at all.

jdw643• 25 days ago

I'm going through each one, and it's fascinating to see things like this. The UAF principle in c-ares is really interesting.

The problem ultimately came from not being able to prevent stale pointers. The attack works by figuring out the size of the stale pointer, then spraying memory with data of the same size, and finally achieving RCE (Remote Code Execution). How do people even come up with ideas like this?

jdw643• 25 days ago

But do people actually find these vulnerabilities on their own, or are they using LLMs? I was curious about how these vulnerabilities work, so I tried asking my dear friend Mr. CLAUDE, but he immediately threw an error and ended the session because it was a cybersecurity question. Enterprise APIs block even the analysis itself, so it's amazing that people can actually pull this off in practice.

lacoolj• 25 days ago

I imagine this is a large open model like GLM5.2 etc

raesene9• 25 days ago

If you want to chat with Claude about this, I'd recommend using Opus 4.6. IME it's happy to talk about (and even write) PoC exploits

nicce• 25 days ago

People have always used tools. Some people have better tools than others. I guess the line is thin whether they found on their own or not.

jeffbee2• 25 days ago

le sigh, c-ares. Very predictable outcome. If you ever find yourself entertaining the idea that you will simply write non-blocking network protocol stacks in C with manual lifetime management, slap yourself. It doesn't matter if you think you are a super genius of unimpeachable taste. The job is impossible.

jdw643• 25 days ago

Thank goodness I use a GC language

mrbluecoat• 25 days ago

A surprising amount of documentation if the actor was just LLM-dropping these..

Retr0id6• 25 days ago

Why is that surprising? LLMs can churn out arbitrary volumes of "documentation" in an instant.

Bengalilol2• 25 days ago

This was sarcasm, meaning exactly what you wrote.

dawnerd• 25 days ago

That seems trivial for an llm to provide.

tliltocatl• 25 days ago

A friendly reminder that a 0-day is a vulnerability that wasn't known until after a malicious actor exploited it. If someone publishes a PoC, it is not a 0-day, just a vulnerability.

Retr0id6• 25 days ago

No, the days start counting from the availability of a patch.

rmast• 25 days ago

I was thinking that the other definition was right and this correction was wrong.

Then I did some searching and found multiple examples of both definitions in use, making things murky.

So I turned to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: “ of, relating to, or being a vulnerability (as in a computer or computer system) that is discovered and exploited (as by cybercriminals) before it is known to or addressed by the maker or vendor”

And of course they use an “or” to make it ambiguous as to whether the days start counting when the vulnerability becomes known, or when the vendor has addressed it.

0123456789ABCDE2• 25 days ago

what if a path is never released?

richbell• 25 days ago

I've only heard it used as Retr0id's definition.

cubefox2• 25 days ago

A friendly reminder that a 0-day is a vulnerability that wasn't known until after a malicious actor exploited it.

No, the full name was always "zero-day exploit". The number 0 refers to the days between the vulnerability being known by the vendor and the public availability of the exploit. So the vendor has zero days to create a security patch before the release of the exploit.

The term "zero-day vulnerability" is a derived term to refer to a vulnerability affected by a zero-day exploit. Similarly, a "zero-day attack" is a derived term to refer to an attack carried out using a zero-day exploit.

Retr0id6• 25 days ago

I took a look at the Ghidra ones (because I use Ghidra), and I'm unimpressed: https://github.com/bikini/exploitarium/blob/main/ghidra-12.1...

The first requires being able to overwrite binaries in the Swift tool directory. Yes, if you overwrite binaries executed by ghidra, you can trigger code execution. This is not a surprise.

The second, idk, I'm not familiar with TraceRMI (but it's probably worth noting that "RMI" stands for Remote Method Invocation).

The third is not a vulnerability in the slightest, they just demonstrate that native 7zip parsing code is reachable. Maybe there is a bug in the 7zip parser, but without that it's meaningless.

skerit• 25 days ago

I immediately saw the Ghidra one and was thinking: huh?

firefax2• 25 days ago

The bigger takeaway is someone that smart is pissed off and dropping their shit with zero warning... but hey, that's just like, my opinion man.

Retr0id6• 25 days ago

You don't need to be pissed off to decide that immediate public disclosure is the best option.

puchatek• 25 days ago

Approaching the maintainers would be ideal but time-consuming. Disclosing it like this is neutral I guess. Better than selling it in the darknet.

I do wonder though: if you can tell the AI to search for vulns, can't you also tell it to contact the right maintainer for each one found?

K0balt2• 24 days ago

The point is that anyone looking for zero days has them in spades, in this age of LLM use.

So, knowing that bad actors have an unending river of cheaply acquired zero days, the best response is to publish them so that maintainers also have access to them. Existing methods of slow disclosure cannot keep up with the AI firehose.

It’s ugly, but it will force needed change. A thorough AI red team effort is the lowest bar of releasing software responsibly in this day and age.

andrepd• 25 days ago

Yes, if you overwrite binaries executed by ghidra, you can trigger code execution.
but it's probably worth noting that "RMI" stands for Remote Method Invocation

This reminds me of someone submitting a (clearly vibecoded) vulnerability report claiming to have found a way to execute arbitrary SQL. The project in question? An SQL server... https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/pull/4322

pverheggen• 25 days ago

lol, that's great...the "vulnerability" isn't even in turso itself, it's a helper method inside a unit test.

gwerbin• 25 days ago

The Turso example is a little ironic because their homepage brands them as a product intended for use primarily by AI agents.

microgpt3• 25 days ago

actually that is a valid vulnerability if it wasn't in test code but the correct fix would be to enclose the table name in "" with escaping

ryukoposting• 25 days ago

I'm no expert on any of these programs, but that's kinda the problem, isn't it? No single person is an expert on every codebase supposedly exploited in this repo.

After a bit of research, the Firefox one seems plausible to me. But, I haven't actually tried the POC. The explanation about the private-data and untrusted-input flags is plausible but I'm not an expert on Firefox's internals, maybe that's not actually how it works.

This just sucks, all around. Are we going to need every open source project gawking at the same repo full of stuff that has nothing to do with them, on the off chance that someone discloses a vuln that does have to do with them? Is this some kind of performative complaint about high friction in responsible disclosure? Well great job dickhead, you've just made a system that's even worse. Nobody benefits from this. Yuck yuck yuck.

trinari• 25 days ago

I actually prefer them being public than in some governments or corporations toolbox

DANmode5• 25 days ago

Nobody benefits from this

Disclosures always enable more secure software to theoretically exist,

even if nobody follows through creating it.

They often do.

SunnyNeon• 25 days ago

The inputs are truncated to prevent malicious prompt injections. The PoC ignores this by using a fake model which is easily convinced.

woodruffw4• 25 days ago

The Gitea one looks marginally interesting, but is probably not exploitable in practice (unless Gitea or whoever else isn’t properly isolating jobs on dedicated VMs). I suspect GitHub Actions has similar behavior and is not considered exploitable because the user is assumed to already have local, non-namespaced root access.

Scaled• 25 days ago

Gitea action runner has a bunch of different ways to setup and doing the isolation properly looks tricky. The documentation doesn't provide any isolation tests to administrators, either.

The biggest mitigation is that gitea documentation discourages you from using action runners from untrusted users. Not flawless security, but it's something...

ofjcihen• 25 days ago

Was just thinking it would be hilarious if these were all known CVEs hiding the next Shai-Hulud inside of them and waiting to compromise security hobbyists rushing to download them.

Retr0id6• 25 days ago

It wouldn't be the first time!

linzhangrun• 25 days ago

The design purpose of Windows Sandbox :)

charcircuit• 25 days ago

The first requires being able to overwrite binaries in the Swift tool directory.

Does it? Or does it need to be in the same directory you invoked ghidra?

newguy334• 25 days ago

Ghidra one is pretty weak, but I checked out the ones that were interesting to me (c-ares, libssh2, ffmpeg) and they seem to all work as of the latest upstream commit. Weird

athrowaway3z• 25 days ago

A glance at the nmap one seems potentially high severity. It might be a nothing in practice, but it being around parser code means the chances of preparing something to jump around are pretty high.

There'd be a certain irony being able to reverse shell anyone doing an nmap scan. If i had infinite tokens i'd throw claude on writing an exploit and dig through the history who made it possible because - if we take a moment to wildly speculate and assume it can ACE - this is the kind of bug an intelligence agency would love to have: Add a few ipv6 packets that then edit the trace being observed if the observer uses nmap / get access to any researcher pc who uses nmap.

formerly_proven2• 25 days ago

Wireshark dissectors (protocol decoders) are basically all written in C, and anyone sending packets can pick a dissector.

trollbridge• 25 days ago

These kind of tools have always had a broad attack surface. I've assumed state level actors already have exploits for them, mostly based on when I've used such tools for mundane network maintenance tasks and somehow do something that triggered an old-fashioned segfault.

theginger• 25 days ago

There'd be a certain irony being able to reverse shell anyone doing an nmap scan.

Every TV / movie hacker has known about this.

saidnooneever• 25 days ago

7zip has been known to be buggy ,its very likely.

code execution js code execution, if reached through some bug or executing code that was not intended to be executed its bad, even if the mechanism is kind of obvious and trivial, it still can lead to unexpected code to be launched.

the repo also notes low quality of some POC like ones you noted.

its correct to be a bit wary and i wouldnt call it some crazy 0day dropping account or anything, but bugs/vulns are bugs an vulns and simply because you are not impressed by their complexity, it does not reduce them entirely. just makes em lil less scary.

the ghidra one, it reminds of things like unquoted service paths in windows services. its a silly thing and clearly its bad but it still happens and gets companies pwned :'). a lot of companies use ghidra actively and if you imagine what kind, you'd hope they will not allow the overwriting of those swift binaries ;p. some pentester bound to have a laugh.

jkrejcha• 25 days ago

...Ghidra

Ah, MS07-052[1] ("code execution leads to code execution") strikes again. These sorts of "if you allow arbitrary code to be executed, code will be executed" "vulnerability" reports seem evergreen

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070807-00/?p=25...

Folcon• 24 days ago

So I've been wondering about whether there's a new vector that can come out of this? Or perhaps new vector isn't the right way of putting it, not a security expert :)

By mass sharing these kinds of gaps and utilising mythos tier LLM's ability to find and combine multiple disparate bits of information together, are we increasing it's capabilities and versatility?

kodareef5• 25 days ago

trying something new? this is interesting. the problem is that submitting reports is too slow. if you find one then your not supposed to share. but then over the next 90 days you learn no one cares and 13 other people submitted it before you, 43 after. maybe better that we just know. so we can run code we can trust sooner. zero is the proper number of dependencies. otherwise assume its broken.

drob5183• 25 days ago

There is going to be a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them. It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed. Yes, there will always be some level of this, but I’d expect it to be low and the exploits found to be increasingly complex. This is a time of transition.

jMyles• 25 days ago

It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed.

Seems like we're already in the middle of this phase, but rather than dying down, the 'reports' have just gotten more noisy and obtuse, making it more difficult to establish the actual degree of threat / attack vector.

justacrow• 25 days ago

And if you are a state agency who'd like to keep the undisclosed zero-days you rely on secret, spamming maintainers with reports makes sense.

As a bonus if you find any actual zero-days in your mass-generated ones you don't report it and get a new one to play with.

utopiah3• 25 days ago

a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them.

I really think this characterization is misleading. It's not "getting smart", only more tailored toward a specific usage, better curated dataset, better harness, better prompts, better labeling of results, documentation of failures and success, etc.

The outcome is (hopefully) overall better but this anthropomorphized wording makes it sound like AI itself is somehow changing or evolving. No, both academia doing fundamental research, industry making it available commercially, and finally security researchers making the entire tooling and process packaged as a service are actively shaping it to make it better. There is no "it".

drob5183• 25 days ago

Yes, of course. I’m definitely anthropomorphizing as a shorthand. I’m the first one to say that these models are just a lot of matrix math.

handoflixue2• 25 days ago

Do you have a definition of "smart" such that there is something an AI could do to prove itself intelligent?

Or are you just defining "fast" as something only horses can do, and considering that a useful insight about cars?

xbmcuser2• 25 days ago

I think you are giving the word "smart" a meaning or implication that it no longer has or is used with. It is common to say Google Search or Siri got smarter/better or dumber/worse, so I don't see saying LLMs getting smarter is any different.

juleiie• 25 days ago

Honestly execution complexity is over time becoming a lower and lower barrier too.

yieldcrv• 25 days ago

It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed.

Every software update introduces and reintroduces them

drob5183• 25 days ago

Perhaps, but as the AI analysis becomes part of the release process (or even the CI process as prices fall), you’d expect those new issues to be caught before release and fixed. We’re seeing them caught post-release for now because the code is older than the AIs, so we’re catching up.

necovek5• 25 days ago

I actually do not expect it to die down: as legitimate ones get fixed, LLM-based tools will continue finding other unfixed non-issues repeatedly, and overeager "researchers" will continue reporting them.

blazespin4• 24 days ago

Yeah, I am seeing this as well, especially as people use AI to code review stuff more so this sort of thing slips through. On one very large project I am looking at, it's already becoming harder to find issues.

These people whinging about slop don't realize everything that doesn't come from a credible source gets ignored.

Credible people are using AI and once these issues are fixed, it will die down.

The threat of AI zero days will persist though, but they will be much more expensive and subtle to find.

johnwheeler• 25 days ago

That's one way to do it.

segmondy2• 25 days ago

What if this person is from an AI lab that really wants the govt to keep suppressing Mythos/Fable & GPT5.6? It's what I would do, the timing couldn't be any better.

0123456789ABCDE2• 25 days ago

wouldn't it be trivial to match the repo to the user logs?

segmondy2• 25 days ago

my point is that if someone is releasing these without access to mythos/gpt5.6, then it can spook to govt and cause them to keep suppressing access to those models. if i'm competing with anthropic or openai and feel they have pulled far ahead, this is a decent move. i didn't say that it is for sure what's going on, but hey, there's a tiny bit of probability that it can't be ruled out.

doe88• 25 days ago

0-days-vibes-vulns? There should be a new category, for spotting and handling the em-dashes of this brave new world of vulns and making the old fossils like me only picking my head up for the old painfully still hand-crafted artisanal ones instead. A kind of label, like free-range for eggs, in sum.

tyre3• 25 days ago

Yes, big pet peeve of the new world. Every em dash is apparently an AI trigger. Back in my day, they were a sign of great respect within my people.

Barbing• 25 days ago

I might like to see a collection of pre-2022 em-dash usage—a subset I suppose of the Low Background Steel category (https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai).

sureMan6• 25 days ago

You completely misunderstanding the comment feels like an AI trigger

rogerrogerr6• 25 days ago

I used to be an em-dash user, but now my opinion is that I’d rather be perceived as someone who does not want to be confused with an LLM. So I’ve changed my writing style.

sva_• 25 days ago

I propose that humans use Unicode U+2E3B three em dash ⸻ it is an impressively long character.

Dumblydorr• 25 days ago

It’s so they don’t train on AI data, right?

nativeit• 25 days ago

I still use them frequently. On iOS you just tap the hyphen twice, and it inserts an em dash—sorta like that.

timcobb• 25 days ago

The question is whether the m-dashes are surrounded by spaces or not. The spaces are utterly maddening. But yeah, RIP the mdash, who would have thought.

nonethewiser• 25 days ago

The thing is, in lots of contexts you cant easily type em dashes.

Google docs will convert “—-“ to an emdash but simple text inputs wont.

So when you see one in that context you have to consider the explanation. They copy pasted an em dash specifically, they drafted in Google docs, they know the unicode keyboard shortcut, etc. None of these are safe assumptions. And if it’s markdown you know it wasnt drafted in Google docs.

cik• 25 days ago

I'm still waiting for the interrabang to become compromised as well. They've already taken my em dash, and my use of the Oxford command, apparently, is an insant flag.

wil421• 25 days ago

How many college kids are going to be flagged for using an em dash?

VCFundedGenYer• 24 days ago

To me em dashes have always just been an annoyance. For example, Word and OneNote were (and likely still are) very keen on converting every dash to an em-dash by default, and I frequently find myself needing to immediately undo that.

djmips• 25 days ago

Those aren't even em-dashes and yet there's a huge thread talking about them.

jmmcd• 25 days ago

It's interesting that Claude also over-uses en-dashes. It's very willing to create compound-noun-phrases, especially in that compressed-summary-paragraph it often writes. The 0-days-vibes-vulns that started this thread looks a lot like that, but it could be Claude directly, or just Claude's style influencing people who spend too much time with it.

kordlessagain• 25 days ago

..."and for the love of God, don't use M dashes when you write it"...input goes on for an hour droning about slop...

haberdasher• 25 days ago

"cybercrime is cringe"

jmward01• 25 days ago

I think people may miss the point of a repo like this. Individually these are small puzzle pieces that can't do anything. Put them all in one place and it becomes easier to pick up pieces and try them together to see if they fit and build something bigger. Get enough pieces to fit together and you actually have something. This is the 'FOUO' idea in security. Enough open information gathered together in one place crosses the boundary from 'just public info' to 'secret stuff here!'. Now we have automatic puzzle solvers (coding assistants) a repo like this becomes a lot more meaningful.

esikich3• 25 days ago

Yep and typically none of this is meaningful unless you have no security practices at all. You can't have it both ways. Every security team says these things are all critical even though, for example, it's only being used internally. Cool, so you somehow have our network cert, are on site physically, have compromised a laptop fully without all of our tools detecting weird shit, have a password, admin access to the repo, somehow are spoofing MFA, etc etc. Yeah it all adds up, but as an admin I'm just fucking done dropping everything for these kinds of things.

grayhatter7• 25 days ago

At the time I post these, none have been reported. Feel free to report them yourself and take credit for the CVE if handed out lulz. I do this so to allure people into the field, and I've always found this is the most efficient way.

I've been a skiddy, he would have believed this. Thankfully, I've grown a bit, and can see this for the transparent, "I'm angry and want to hurt others so I will feel a little less alone", it actually is.

I'm sorry you're so angry dude (me too), but as someone who's joined the blue side, we'd appreciate it if you gave us some kind of heads up, the bad guys generally have a lot more time to scroll for new payloads than I do. Not all of us deserve the kindness of a heads up, but every single one of our users deserve it. Don't punish them because you're mad at someone else.

You can flex on the idiots you're trying to flex on, without hurting people. Even an email to security@[that_project_domain] saying "hey, I've published these" would move you from the group of people I see making the world worse, into the group making it better. (You don't have to, obviously, but making the whole world worse wont make you less angry.)

voodooEntity• 25 days ago

While i can follow your path, maybe because i see the same, i sadly have seen in groups of friends how this can go sideways very fast. If you report things, some companies gone treat you as a criminal/offensive actor and even go legal actions against you even you just tellem here you got this vuln.

Sure you than can do it anonymous and so on but point is : its not like every actor that gets notified will react thankful to it. Some even just ignore it.

esikich3• 25 days ago

How bad are your security practices that these tiny obscure things matter? None of these findings that show up here on HN should even make you flinch. The alarmist takes on this stuff is fucking exhausting and I'm tired of security teams bugging me about it. Do your job and this shit doesn't matter AT ALL.

grayhatter7• 25 days ago

I said "doesn't matter" to someone once... the resulting lesson came in the form of a reply from the whitehat researcher (waves, hi brian!) a 16step exploit chain resulting in a one click full account takeover.

I'm equally annoyed and over the alarmist takes. But I don't think it's fair to group mine into it. I'm annoyed at seeing discard respect for others into the same void everyone is happy to toss quality.

Do these tiny things matter? No, not to the default-panic-level everyone adopts when they see 0day, or CVE... but duh, I'm now just repeating exactly what you already said. That no, for the record is mostly because I don't use any of these, not just because they're boring exploits. While I always look, I default assume anything CVE is boring/pointless. But I still read them.

But then, I'm not trying to convince the owner of the repo. I'm trying to discourage the theme among researchers that "no one cares", because I have seen researchers disclose bugs publicly, that we'd be eager to pay out on, because they disagreed with the decision on their last report.

I've fixed bugs being actively exploited against our users, that was found/fixed only after a whitehat report for something adjacent (we pay on those btw, and you should too). I don't wanna live in the world where it's easier for the bad guys, the only way we get there is once "everyone knows", you gotta report the all bugs that you can turn into an exploit. I don't want "the whitehat researcher culture" to move towards, who cares' dump the PoC on github, screw anyone that could be hurt by the bad guys, they deserve to be punished for the incompetence of others. SWE's are shit at security, security researchers are shit at SWE, the only way we get the good outcome, is if they're willing (and encouraged) to work together.

sellmesoap• 25 days ago

User/admin discretion for software they use should be a big factor, sometimes getting burned is how you learn to play with fire. Or decide that having your data/participation disrespected means you need to set harder boundaries. My solution is to try things in isolation, run very few services, try to avoid becoming dependent on the online, appreciate the offline and local first.

d-cc4• 25 days ago

I've been a skiddy, he would have believed this. Thankfully, I've grown a bit, and can see this for the transparent, "I'm angry and want to hurt others so I will feel a little less alone", it actually is

Please name the "victims" here.

I'm genuinely curious, have you ever had actual, direct threats to your safety before, as a person? As in, murder, torture, false imprisonment, or other __likely and credible__ threats of grave bodily harm?

but as someone who's joined the blue side

Are you somebody who separates "cybersecurity" from say: military intelligence poisoning one of your employees, sending them to a hospital which is already compromised, before sending back their new asset into your very "secure" company?

ok1234562• 25 days ago

Pretty unimpressive as security vulnerabilities. It would be better to just say these are simple bugs for the most part.

unnouinceput• 25 days ago

all vulnerabilities are just bugs.

stonogo3• 25 days ago

But not the other way around, which makes them different.

GTP7• 25 days ago

Vulns are a subset of bugs. What the above commenter is saying, is that some bugs don't belong to this category.

wavemode• 24 days ago

No, not all vulnerabilities are bugs. "Bug" implies a system working in a way its creators did not intend, but a system can be working exactly as intended yet have a vulnerability.

For example, if you allow weak passwords, then you have a trivial vulnerability to people guessing other people's passwords. But nothing about the login system is working differently from how anyone intended. It's just that the intentions themselves were naïve.

newguy334• 25 days ago

I disagree. That FFmpeg code execution is absolutely nasty

albroland2• 25 days ago

Maybe I'm missing something but the ffmpeg buffer "exploit" involves passing a custom exploited buffer callback to parse a RASC file that presumably has been crafted to contain a packet that can exploit the custom buffer passed in? I don't see how this would be used in practice in the wild as to achieve the first step (custom buffer invocation) would require you to already have access to the machine to even invoke ffmpeg with it?

Like yes there is a heap OOB issue in an incredibly old file format, but without already having arguably compromised access to a machine, exploiting it for RCE seems impossible?

n0on3• 25 days ago

Apparently nobody cares. A few days ago I bumped-into and submitted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48655747 . I thought given the general trust people seem to place in media files it would have raised a few eyebrows but it did not ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄

bassiee• 25 days ago

I also have a library of bugs I found using Claude Opus 4.8 through the Customer Verification Program. Undisclosed, Atp I dont even know if they have been found by someone else. But just like this repo

Theres a bunch of very specific scenario DoS bugs, buffer over/ underflows, that will get caught by ASLR and whatnot

When I report serious ones, mostly the devs will respond with something like, yeah, thats how we designed it in a dangerous way, so that the layer above or below can solve the issues, and other footgun stuff.

blincoln2• 24 days ago

When I report serious ones, mostly the devs will respond with something like, yeah, thats how we designed it in a dangerous way, so that the layer above or below can solve the issues, and other footgun stuff.

This is one of the reasons that responsible disclosure exists. Their tune will likely change after sufficient bad publicity.

If the Apache Solr devs can be convinced to add authentication to their product instead of hand-waving about reverse proxies or other add-ons, anyone can.

jiug• 25 days ago

"Cibercrime is cringe"

hypercain• 25 days ago

Mythos has been achieved internally

xlayn• 25 days ago

I want to rush to git clone, but as things are, the odds are extremely high that this kind of things that are too good to be real are honeypots and something there will compromise your machine or make your llm start working for someone else...

GTP7• 25 days ago

Then, don't rush and take a few minutes to set up a virtual machine.

IncreasePosts• 25 days ago

What about all the virtual machine zero days?

midtake• 25 days ago

You can just download the zip over HTTPS

necovek5• 25 days ago

What if it's leveraging a zero day in your zip or https library?

dvt• 25 days ago

Went over a few of these with a pretty keen eye, and they aren't that particularly interesting. The Docker one is just a weird bug, it's not a vulnerability, and certainly not a "0-day" (which is a pretty loaded term and people expect bad stuff to happen).

The nghttp2 nghttpx one is more interesting, and could potentially be used for phishing, but it's very hard to line up properly because the request queue is non-deterministic so basically impossible to target a specific victim (assuming proxy traffic).

The VLC one is just a straight-up crash/bug. And VLC crashes all the time when using weird codecs, so that's nothing new.

Am I missing something here?

jeffbee2• 25 days ago

I mean, that's how people get hacked. If vlc crashed on my computer, and every day I should raise thanks to my gods that I do not use vlc, I would immediately unplug it and thoughtfully consider the circumstances under which it would be safe to turn it back on.

TheTon• 25 days ago

Right, this is why video parse / decode ought to be sandboxed. Writing secure code for these formats, especially in C, is really hard. I just sort of glanced at the bug in the repo, but it sounds plausible. It certainly wouldn’t be the first of its kind.

Wowfunhappy3• 25 days ago

I mean, that's how people get hacked.

...when was the last documented case of an in-the-wild hack targeting VNC?

d-cc4• 25 days ago

I mean, that's how people get hacked. If vlc crashed on my computer, and every day I should raise thanks to my gods that I do not use vlc, I would immediately unplug it and thoughtfully consider the circumstances under which it would be safe to turn it back on.

What are you doing on your computer where it is really a threat to you? I'm curious as to your specific use case :)

zahlman2• 25 days ago

Do you feel the same way about seeing "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" in the terminal from some other arbitrary program?

If not, why not?

icase• 25 days ago

oh-days for days

zkmon• 25 days ago

AI is always a bit eager to report everything as an issue because the "number" of findings is seen as a measure of it's intelligence. Same happens with code review as well. It reports lots of non-issues. I suspect even Mythos output could have the same bloat, and the number (instead of severity) of the issues it reported could have scared people.

dpark• 25 days ago

This is not what I heard from folks who worked directly with mythos. I was told that the vulnerabilities it generated were largely real and meaningful.

scottchiefbaker• 25 days ago

I'm an OSS developer and I've received three "CWE" alerts in the last two weeks. While they were all valid, they were for very trivial things like "this debug logfile could overwrite a file if it were a symlink" and "if a user is able to put OSC screen codes into the Git output they could write arbitrary data to the screen"

These AI models are making *everything* sound like an exploit. Not sure if this is good for the ecosystem. It makes me question everything that comes in more carefully. Is this a real exploit, or someone farming for karma to claim "I opened 39 CWEs in the last week. Hire my 'security' company to audit your code."

ibarrajo• 25 days ago

I’m sitting on a 0-day rce on the tizen browser (smart tv)

Didn’t bother submitting since who actually uses tizen?

a-dub• 25 days ago

cool to see rustdesk. low level memory bugs were long mysterious and i think often received most of the attention for this reason, but always fun to see reminders that "nope, good ol' fashioned logic bugs in high level languages have security implications too." if anything, i think they sometimes are more clever as they require deeper understanding of what the code actually does, intends to do and what was overlooked rather than the common set of bookkeeping errors that are often the root of the memory bugs.

himata4113• 25 days ago

Ah yes, the typical 'echo' command accepting untrusted user input 0-days.

ozim3• 25 days ago

I call fake or BS because Microsoft would be already on it.

ozim3• 25 days ago

I will consider it legit when in next 24 hours MSFT blocks it.

Dibby053• 24 days ago

Take a look now.

ozim3• 23 days ago

Great — now this opens the question:

Why GitHub, people don’t know any better?

shevy-java• 25 days ago

Skynet's strategy is to beat us into submission via spam slop.

waynecochran2• 25 days ago

      Do NOT, under any circumstances, use any material in this repository
      maliciously. This is good-faith, open-disclosure vulnerability 
      research intended to get more people interested in exploring 
      this area of cybersecurity.

Reminds of the message in the The Anarchist Cookbook before one the recipes that essentially said: "This is really dangerous, don't ever do it, here is how you do it."

Aachen• 25 days ago

The old book didn't say "... maliciously." though?

waynecochran2• 25 days ago

Of course not. You can melt things w thermite without being malicious. Like my friend's toolbox for instance.

0xroi• 25 days ago

Those all are fake AI gen text.

chrismarlow9• 25 days ago

Looks like a bunch of re worded copies of existing CVE and a few new lower severity things. I only call them low sev because they seem to require the user to do things that are already inherently dangerous. Just my 2 cents from a quick scan.

Edit:

To be clear still interesting finds. I think with some chaining some of them might be more severe. Like the ovpn one and windows potentially registering vpn app as default open or some protocol opener for a url location like openvpn:// in an I frame and some clever social engineering. Just a random thought

newguy334• 25 days ago

Yea, that's what's confusing. some of these are like lower level slop but some are like genuine criticals.

Floci, libssh2, c-ares, FFmpeg, and the PHP one are all LEGIT./

The Ghidra one for example, not so much. I cant help but wonder if this was halfway completed research folder and they just published it as is

andai2• 25 days ago

I wonder if LLMs can tell the difference. Maybe it's like back in the day when you had to add "+good -bad" because otherwise it wouldn't know you wanted it to be good.

smsm426• 25 days ago

PHP one is at best a moderate-level bug in SOAP client which I don't see any realistic way to exploit (the whole convoluted setup in the POC assumes PHP execution access, which begs the question why bother if you already can execute arbitrary code?) - does not look like "genuine critical" at all.

ChuckMcM• 25 days ago

Looks like someone is running one of the LLM models and publishing the results. It looks that way because there is a really wide mix from things that are silly "replace system binaries to run arbitrary code!" to things that could be legit. That is kind of par for the course when you ask an LLM to 'find an exploit and write a PoC' kind of prompt. Presumably if you train something on the last 15 years of Metasploit[1] reports it can find the same bugs that people have written into new code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasploit

phs318u• 25 days ago

I get the sense that folks here are assuming this could be the work of an AI practitioner or bot dumping a bunch of exploits. Assuming there are some serious exploits in this trove, what would the motive be to do it in this way - without reaching out to the various code maintainers in some way?

xbmcuser2• 25 days ago

Bugs are bugs security vulnerablities or not it's good for open source project when someone actually goes through the code even if it is with an llm. As most people assume someone has gone through the code when it might not be true.

TallGuyShort2• 25 days ago

This is common in the hype era of AI models that can look for security bugs. An open-source project I used to work on that is basically "distributed code execution as a service" keeps getting reports that the job submission function is a vulnerability. The reporters don't even understand what the project does.

blincoln2• 24 days ago

Is the job submission handled securely?

I've seen plenty of systems along the lines of what you're describing where unauthenticated clients can submit jobs. Sometimes the developers even claim that's intentional. Either way, it's a vulnerability, because it compromises the underlying hosts.

TallGuyShort2• 20 days ago

Yes, and that's not what people are reporting flaws in. The reports are "this daemon accepts arbitrary code and then runs it!"

smsm426• 25 days ago

PHP one appears to be a convoluted way of executing arbitrary code on a local server conditioned on the ability of already executing arbitrary PHP code. In other words, not a security issue at all. The cookie parsing issue might be a bug with security implications if you talk to hostile SOAP servers (didn't look deeper into it but it's plausible) but I can't see how it can be effectively exploited without having a level of access on the target server which makes the whole exploiting question moot.

sampli• 25 days ago

Some skid that bought a GitHub account (real word username) and just let fable go nuts on stuff without actually proving it on real applications

reinitctxoffset• 25 days ago

The only thing with a worse inflation story in 2026 than the United States Dollar is the Zero Day.

Used to be a zero day got you unauthorized access to a computer system with no warning.

Now it might not even get a maintainer to do a patch when they're bored.

squeegeeninja• 25 days ago

It seems like we are watching the newest form of the script kiddie evolve in real time (no offense intended towards the author, everyone starts out young). It's going to be interesting whether this evolves into its own thing or just ends up being the same old dynamics but with a new set of tools.

microgpt3• 25 days ago

Doesn't GitHub require phone number these days? Shouldn't be hard to trace

consp• 25 days ago

Of course no services to fake this exists or have existed. I mean, a well determined person can het around such issues.

microgpt3• 24 days ago

When you fake it it's still registered to someone and that person is liable for whatever crimes are committed under it. Or at least that's how it works in most of Europe.

Ozodbek13372• 25 days ago

I'm sure this account owner reported them to vendor and after getting rejection researches uploaded here many of exploits written by AI

Ozodbek13372• 25 days ago

I think attacker received rejection from vendor some of them duplicate some of them N/A after this account owner published them many of them written by AI not by real researcher

Manishearth• 25 days ago

I recently used a pretty well-tuned LLM to find ~500 safety bugs across the Rust ecosystem. Most of them are minor, and even major safety issues in Rust usually mean "it's possible to accidentally use this API in a way that is broken" not "this is directly exploitable", but I didn't want to just file LLM output as issues on these repos.

I very briefly considered doing something like this: if I just post the results on the internet, people can crowdsource filing issues and working on fixes. It's certainly not the nicest way of doing this, but on balance I'd like these issues to be fixed eventually.

I ended up not doing that and am instead filing a couple issues a day because it's not that much of a burden. This was an experiment that was much more successful than I expected, so I didn't budget to spend this time, but it's also not a huge deal to slowly do it.

Aurornis• 24 days ago

Can you at least provide some links to examples of the issues you’re filing?

I’ve seen so many claims of people who used LLMs to generate hundreds of issues that turned out to be full of hallucinations or non-bugs being described as bugs that any claim like this needs some real evidence. Saying you found 500 safety bugs in Rust but that you’re casually only filing a couple of them makes this hard to believe.

blazespin4• 24 days ago

I have a dozen or so critical CVEs now, it's not hard to believe at all if they're just hardening tasks. I can get a dozen hardening tasks from just one prompt. I don't even bother filing them as the critical ones are more important right now.

asqueella• 23 days ago

Don't let the hype turn you into a cynic. You're replying to a Rust core team member, who explicitly says the issues are mostly minor, across Rust ecosystem and not in Rust itself, and that they're filing them manually to avoid dumping unreviewed AI output on people.

It's easy to find the 37 issues they have already filed: https://github.com/search?q=soundness+gemini++author%3AManis...

flyingshelf• 24 days ago

You're using AI to find issues, why are you not using AI to fix them? Issues are for humans.

Of course don't just spam untested PRs as that will land you in PR jail very quickly.

simonpure• 24 days ago

The readme was recently updated.

In regard to AI usage, my fuzzing workflow was automated by AI with a strict harness. I used GPT-5.5-3-Codex-Spark for ALL the fuzzing, as barely any "thought" is necessary when provided with an efficient harness. Contrary to the growing narrative that I'm just some random child burning tokens, I DO actually have a degree in the subject and have published multiple papers on fuzzing methodology. I spent years researching and developing new tools and ideas for how to fuzz. You do NOT need a SOTA model to help you identify these issues, I promise!

tyrells• 24 days ago

Any thoughts on what type of harness this would be?

blazespin4• 24 days ago

Just optimized AI driven fuzzing. Do a search on arxiv you'll find a lot.

zftnb666• 24 days ago

Someone's last day at their job is going to be everyone's last day at their job.

the_rz1027• 22 days ago

I have a correction for CVE-2026-20896 (Gitea trusted-proxies / X-WEBAUTH-USER) was not part of this dump.

It was reported by @rz1027 (me) as in Gitea's coordinated 1.26.3 security release, credited in the release notes. The exploitarium's actual Gitea PoC is a different bug (act_runner container-options escape).

Refs: [https://blog.gitea.com/release-of-1.26.3-and-1.26.4/] [https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/security/advisories/GHSA-f... ] [https://hivesecurity.gitlab.io/blog/gitea-forgejo-nine-cves-...].

Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days

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