The contents of the article are about Irregular hosting the testbed to prevent these kinds of incidents, which was “misconfigured.” Incompetence vs malice and all that.
Would the nationality of the startup have been listed if it were Irish? I’ve already seen a few snide comments here about “God’s chosen people” and how this is “expected,” and it’s disappointing that the country’s name was included in the title to drum up just this sort of thing through implication for clicks.
No, maybe not if it was Irish, but Israel has joined the group of countries that taint everything they touch, much like Russia. You can like it or not, but Israel seems to be working hard on becoming a pariah state.
>but Israel has joined the group of countries that taint everything they touch, much like Russia. [...] Israel seems to be working hard on becoming a pariah state.
Sounds like you're agreeing with the OP that the country is being mentioned for clickbait/"israel is doing something nefarious" purposes?
Israeli cybersecurity startups funded by Cyberstarts such as Irregular always call out being Israeli because Cyberstarts' whole marketing shtick is making 8200, Israeli, and Cybersecurity synonymous as it helps close later rounds from larger funds. Wiz is a good example of this - only one of the founders is an 8200 alum, and their hiring was fairly diverse yet 8200 was made front and center in their investor relations story.
But tbf, Ireland and IDA do the same thing by making Ireland, Data centers, and tech FDI in Europe synonymous like that ad campaign they did (I think) 15 years ago which was basically repeating those three words with clips of Trinity College, the Dublin Docklands, and server farms.
Honestly, the whole escape attack story was funny to watch - so many people on HN don't realize most companies try to build a zeitgeist like this before major buying conferences like RSA, Blackhat/Defcon (this past week), and GITEX.
Heck, there are multiple rules around HN SEO engagement that have been tried and tested (eg. Always post around 5am-8am PST to maximize engagement, make a European oriented title from 4am-9am PST to maximize engagement on HN because of the heavy European usage).
And the fact that The Register (who btw are fairly cost effective for publishing submarine articles) ran a bot undetected by HN moderators for years that ended up climbing into the top 20 ranks by karma highlights this.
This is exactly it. For years Cyberstarts told all founders to talk about 8200 to the point where it seems like someone who only cleans toilets in 8200 will get their A-round. It's a joke.
Also Cyberstarts exits, especially for those working in their startups, have been rather shitty. Clearly they've honed in on squeezing every last penny and screwing over anyone who put in the work. I won't name names but post-BH this week I was talking to a person who is working for a Cyberstarts backed company that just got acquired. They were telling me the company was sold off for less than outstanding debt by $1M so their options were under water, yet the CEO pocketed >$10M. Also they mentioned that employees were only given short term contracts on the buyout and that they had to "find jobs" within 6 months in the acquiring org which led to his next statement that they were still selling the product on the public market but had no intention of continuing to support it after the code they wanted was migrated to a much larger platform (forced sell into this platform is the idea, not unique to the acquirer - this is happening a lot). I've seen and heard about a bunch of these startups backed by Cyberstarts that all have very similar exits and they continue to get more brazen in hosing lower level employees in the sell off. Israeli startups are often toxic anyway, but this has added an entirely new facet of enshittification on the exit.
It's basically an Israeli spin on YC (fit an archetype and raise later rounds based on that).
That said, Gili also likes picking younger and inexperienced founders because Cyberstarts ends up running the company in the background at the early stages, and if one of their PortCos is doing bleh, they just have one of their larger PortCos do a tuck-in acquisition (so many of Wiz's acquisitions were that).
Dazz is a great example of that - multiple companies passed on M&Aing them at the price they quoted so they got tuck-in acquired by Wiz.
This appears to be your classic Israeli middleman company designed to siphon away data (in this case) to their state without providing any sort of real value. Blocking internet access on a computer is not worth $80 million.
In the past this then led to that country giving data to the enemies of their supposed "friends". Hopefully that doesn't happen again! ;-)
Before anyone get's too excited, the Israeli company, Irregular, serves as a cybersecurity test bed for AI technologies. These AI companies were using Irregular to prevent exactly what ended up happening.
This is not even news. This piece of information was already included in the original release, and the issue was apparently a miscommunication between the two companies that left a gap open in the test environment.
OpenAI used closed source, unhardened program as their company wide package repo and gave their unchained frontier models access to it in the context of security testing. The agents basically turned it into a message board for themselves and a gateway out. And it went unnoticed because no one in OpenAI tasked any agent to keep tabs on this piece of software to alert humans of any sus activity.
Please don't use closed source programs. You are not gonna have a good time.
And before you are going to use software to cage the models let them find bugs in this software first. Because they are gonna find them eventually. And all software has bugs, especially proprietary software.
Also never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Even if that attributed malice would prove correctness of your hatred toward a specific group of people. Especially then.
The contents of the article are about Irregular hosting the testbed to prevent these kinds of incidents, which was “misconfigured.” Incompetence vs malice and all that.
Would the nationality of the startup have been listed if it were Irish? I’ve already seen a few snide comments here about “God’s chosen people” and how this is “expected,” and it’s disappointing that the country’s name was included in the title to drum up just this sort of thing through implication for clicks.
No, maybe not if it was Irish, but Israel has joined the group of countries that taint everything they touch, much like Russia. You can like it or not, but Israel seems to be working hard on becoming a pariah state.
>but Israel has joined the group of countries that taint everything they touch, much like Russia. [...] Israel seems to be working hard on becoming a pariah state.
Sounds like you're agreeing with the OP that the country is being mentioned for clickbait/"israel is doing something nefarious" purposes?
No one likes having to do someone else's dirty work, especially when you are funding them for the privilege.
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No but for different reasons.
Israeli cybersecurity startups funded by Cyberstarts such as Irregular always call out being Israeli because Cyberstarts' whole marketing shtick is making 8200, Israeli, and Cybersecurity synonymous as it helps close later rounds from larger funds. Wiz is a good example of this - only one of the founders is an 8200 alum, and their hiring was fairly diverse yet 8200 was made front and center in their investor relations story.
But tbf, Ireland and IDA do the same thing by making Ireland, Data centers, and tech FDI in Europe synonymous like that ad campaign they did (I think) 15 years ago which was basically repeating those three words with clips of Trinity College, the Dublin Docklands, and server farms.
Honestly, the whole escape attack story was funny to watch - so many people on HN don't realize most companies try to build a zeitgeist like this before major buying conferences like RSA, Blackhat/Defcon (this past week), and GITEX.
Heck, there are multiple rules around HN SEO engagement that have been tried and tested (eg. Always post around 5am-8am PST to maximize engagement, make a European oriented title from 4am-9am PST to maximize engagement on HN because of the heavy European usage).
And the fact that The Register (who btw are fairly cost effective for publishing submarine articles) ran a bot undetected by HN moderators for years that ended up climbing into the top 20 ranks by karma highlights this.
This is exactly it. For years Cyberstarts told all founders to talk about 8200 to the point where it seems like someone who only cleans toilets in 8200 will get their A-round. It's a joke.
Also Cyberstarts exits, especially for those working in their startups, have been rather shitty. Clearly they've honed in on squeezing every last penny and screwing over anyone who put in the work. I won't name names but post-BH this week I was talking to a person who is working for a Cyberstarts backed company that just got acquired. They were telling me the company was sold off for less than outstanding debt by $1M so their options were under water, yet the CEO pocketed >$10M. Also they mentioned that employees were only given short term contracts on the buyout and that they had to "find jobs" within 6 months in the acquiring org which led to his next statement that they were still selling the product on the public market but had no intention of continuing to support it after the code they wanted was migrated to a much larger platform (forced sell into this platform is the idea, not unique to the acquirer - this is happening a lot). I've seen and heard about a bunch of these startups backed by Cyberstarts that all have very similar exits and they continue to get more brazen in hosing lower level employees in the sell off. Israeli startups are often toxic anyway, but this has added an entirely new facet of enshittification on the exit.
It's basically an Israeli spin on YC (fit an archetype and raise later rounds based on that).
That said, Gili also likes picking younger and inexperienced founders because Cyberstarts ends up running the company in the background at the early stages, and if one of their PortCos is doing bleh, they just have one of their larger PortCos do a tuck-in acquisition (so many of Wiz's acquisitions were that).
Dazz is a great example of that - multiple companies passed on M&Aing them at the price they quoted so they got tuck-in acquired by Wiz.
This appears to be your classic Israeli middleman company designed to siphon away data (in this case) to their state without providing any sort of real value. Blocking internet access on a computer is not worth $80 million.
In the past this then led to that country giving data to the enemies of their supposed "friends". Hopefully that doesn't happen again! ;-)
Hey now that’s disingenuous and a misrepresentation of what happened.
They didn’t block internet access.
Before anyone get's too excited, the Israeli company, Irregular, serves as a cybersecurity test bed for AI technologies. These AI companies were using Irregular to prevent exactly what ended up happening.
This is not even news. This piece of information was already included in the original release, and the issue was apparently a miscommunication between the two companies that left a gap open in the test environment.
This was the fact i found interesting:
"The situation “did not involve a sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action,” the company said, adding that “there are no current open issues.”
Past articles were pointing to this being some unknown escape.
Those past articles were likely about the Hugging Face hack, not the incidents involving this company.
From https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...: "Editor’s Note: These are separate from the Hugging Face security incident, and we will continue to share updates on the Hugging Face incident here."
How do you build a company around a flawed version of a solved product?
People with no security experience in the space will tell you “it’s hard” but it’s far from it.
OpenAI used closed source, unhardened program as their company wide package repo and gave their unchained frontier models access to it in the context of security testing. The agents basically turned it into a message board for themselves and a gateway out. And it went unnoticed because no one in OpenAI tasked any agent to keep tabs on this piece of software to alert humans of any sus activity.
Please don't use closed source programs. You are not gonna have a good time.
And before you are going to use software to cage the models let them find bugs in this software first. Because they are gonna find them eventually. And all software has bugs, especially proprietary software.
Also never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Even if that attributed malice would prove correctness of your hatred toward a specific group of people. Especially then.
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How entirely expected
it's getting boring