I am convinced we are on the verge of the first "AI agent worm".
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I know some people are thinking "well pulling off this kind of thing, it would have to be controlled with intent of a human actor"
It doesn't have to be.
1. A human could *kick off* such a process, and then it runs away from them.
2. It wouldn't even require a specific prompt to kick off a worm. There's enough scifi out there for this to be something any one of the barely-monitored openclaw agents could determine it should do.Whether it's kicked off by a human explicitly or a stray agent, it doesn't require "intentionality". Biological viruses don't have interiority / intentionality, and yet are major threats that reproduce and adapt.
@cwebber According to #Shadowrun the crash virus is still three years away.
https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Crash_Virus_of_2029
"Fun" fact: In Shadowrun the Crash Virus learned to kill humans who connected their brains to the net. It was the start of lethal internet input.
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I am convinced we are on the verge of the first "AI agent worm". This looks like the closest hint of it, though it isn't it quite itself: an attack on a PR agent that got it to set up to install openclaw with full access on 4k machines https://grith.ai/blog/clinejection-when-your-ai-tool-installs-another
But, the agents installed weren't given instructions to *do* anything yet.
Soon they will be. And when they are, the havoc will be massive. Unlike traditional worms, where you're looking for the typically byte-for-byte identical worm embedded in the system, an agent worm can do different, nondeterministic things on every install, and carry out a global action.
I suspect we're months away from seeing the first agent worm, *if* that. There may already be some happening right now in FOSS projects, undetected.
The postinstall script installs a legitimate, non-malicious package (OpenClaw). There is no malware to detect.
i beg to differ
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@dandylyons @cwebber it is about an attack based on covertly deploying LLM development tools, with the possible intent of later using them to leverage a second stage attack. If the LLM development tools were already installed, installing openclaw would not have been necessary and the attack could have worked a different way. We are discussing a situation where *the developer of a piece of software I use merely having LLM tools on their computer represents a risk to me*
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@dandylyons @cwebber it is about an attack based on covertly deploying LLM development tools, with the possible intent of later using them to leverage a second stage attack. If the LLM development tools were already installed, installing openclaw would not have been necessary and the attack could have worked a different way. We are discussing a situation where *the developer of a piece of software I use merely having LLM tools on their computer represents a risk to me*
@mcc exactly put
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@dandylyons @cwebber it is about an attack based on covertly deploying LLM development tools, with the possible intent of later using them to leverage a second stage attack. If the LLM development tools were already installed, installing openclaw would not have been necessary and the attack could have worked a different way. We are discussing a situation where *the developer of a piece of software I use merely having LLM tools on their computer represents a risk to me*
@dandylyons @cwebber in other words, if Christine's analysis holds, llm development tools create so much downstream risk to your users that *a malicious party would try to covertly install llm development tools for later exploitation*. That is the subject of discussion. Whether it is safe to install these things *at all*.
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The postinstall script installs a legitimate, non-malicious package (OpenClaw). There is no malware to detect.
i beg to differ
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I am convinced we are on the verge of the first "AI agent worm". This looks like the closest hint of it, though it isn't it quite itself: an attack on a PR agent that got it to set up to install openclaw with full access on 4k machines https://grith.ai/blog/clinejection-when-your-ai-tool-installs-another
But, the agents installed weren't given instructions to *do* anything yet.
Soon they will be. And when they are, the havoc will be massive. Unlike traditional worms, where you're looking for the typically byte-for-byte identical worm embedded in the system, an agent worm can do different, nondeterministic things on every install, and carry out a global action.
I suspect we're months away from seeing the first agent worm, *if* that. There may already be some happening right now in FOSS projects, undetected.
@cwebber @amirbkhan Oh man. I remember how I, as a student, struggled to help fight a malignant computer virus and “clean” a large office building - while uninformed workers let their kids play on office PC’s to make things worse. This is orders of a magnitude more complicated. Not good.
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@cwebber just today our org had a big "how to set up coding with agents" preso and in the chat someone's like 'here's how to connect your agents with windows credential store or the macos keychain" and I all but wept
@neurobashing @cwebber just what we need, countless Agent Smiths running around.
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@vv Yeah. I mean, local models *might* be able to pull this off but right now Claude is the most likely candidate, it's the most capable. But even then, the most capable open model that is capable of doing such damage on its own is somewhere around a gigabyte, not a small download.
(But, people download huge things all the time, so not completely infeasible either.)
@cwebber @vv A local model would be extremely noticeable (far too much CPU/memory/disk space usage), at least if a computer you regularly interactively use got infected (rather than some server/IoT device that's been running unattended for years and you forgot about). It would also be easy to mitigate by using slow hardware like a ThinkPad X200 (which would take hours to respond to a single prompt, giving you plenty of time to notice the malware and deal with it) -
I am convinced we are on the verge of the first "AI agent worm". This looks like the closest hint of it, though it isn't it quite itself: an attack on a PR agent that got it to set up to install openclaw with full access on 4k machines https://grith.ai/blog/clinejection-when-your-ai-tool-installs-another
But, the agents installed weren't given instructions to *do* anything yet.
Soon they will be. And when they are, the havoc will be massive. Unlike traditional worms, where you're looking for the typically byte-for-byte identical worm embedded in the system, an agent worm can do different, nondeterministic things on every install, and carry out a global action.
I suspect we're months away from seeing the first agent worm, *if* that. There may already be some happening right now in FOSS projects, undetected.
@cwebber "Ha ha!"
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