Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

The term "agents" is often a distraction in my opinion. It's usually a fancy way of saying a prompt with function calls - but since the definition is vague it leads to different people holding different mental models from each other.

As far as I can tell, this team took descriptions of vulnerabilities in the form of CVEs and fed those into a system consisting of various GPT-4 Turbo prompts-with -functions configured for things like executing Playwright commands or running code in a terminal.

They arranged this such that there was a "planner" prompt which could then delegate to prompts specializing in XSS or SQLi. These were the "agents".

I imagine they won't be sharing their code, which is a shame because it would be interesting to see the details of how they got this to work.

We'll soon have FOSS adapters on top of LLM:s or similar software capable of managing and to some degree extend botnets. It's likely something like this will leak from a state actor during the coming years too.

Why would I need an LLM for running a botnet?

What decade are you from, the 2010s? Today you need an LLM, preferably two, to do anything. Just like half a decade ago you needed a blockchain to do anything.

Obviously, the answer is you don't.

My personal concerns are more that we are going to see the botnets get smarter and smarter and more automated.

Just imagine if every script kiddie running a "dumb" botnet suddenly got 2x more effective.

Or rather ^2

He was referring the automatic expansion behavior of the botnet

> capable of managing and to some degree extend botnets.

He was referring to both managing and expanding. The latter I might see an argument for. The former? I do not.

The bot can use the LLM to scan for "interesting" information. It could read emails, see private documents, browsing histories, passwords, etc. Essentially a Recall system controlled by adversarial LLMs. That makes the bot much more dangerous.

Need is such a strong word.

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