New research:
LLM Agents can Autonomously Hack Websites
Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable and can now interact with tools (i.e., call functions), read documents, and recursively call themselves. As a result, these LLMs can now function autonomously as agents. With the rise in capabilities of these agents, recent work has speculated on how LLM agents would affect cybersecurity. However, not much is known about the offensive capabilities of LLM agents.
In this work, we show that LLM agents can autonomously hack websites, performing tasks as complex as blind database schema extraction and SQL injections without human feedback. Importantly, the agent does not need to know the vulnerability beforehand. This capability is uniquely enabled by frontier models that are highly capable of tool use and leveraging extended context. Namely, we show that GPT-4 is capable of such hacks, but existing open-source models are not. Finally, we show that GPT-4 is capable of autonomously finding vulnerabilities in websites in the wild. Our findings raise questions about the widespread deployment of LLMs.
More Stories
Crooks Bypassed Google’s Email Verification to Create Workspace Accounts, Access 3rd-Party Services
Google says it recently fixed an authentication weakness that allowed crooks to circumvent the email verification required to create a Google...
Friday Squid Blogging: Sunscreen from Squid Pigments
They’re better for the environment. Blog moderation policy. Read More
Compromising the Secure Boot Process
This isn’t good: On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than...
Synnovis Restores Systems After Cyber-Attack, But Blood Shortages Remain
Synnovis has rebuilt “substantial parts” of its systems following the Qilin ransomware attack on June 3, enabling the restoration of...
Hacktivists Claim Leak of CrowdStrike Threat Intelligence
CrowdStrike has acknowledged the claims by the USDoD hacktivist group, which has provided a link to download the alleged threat...
CrowdStrike Falcon Outage Exploited for Social Engineering
Cyber threat actors are exploiting the CrowdStrike Falcon outage to conduct social engineering attacks. Here's what the CIS CTI team...