Mythos Attempted to Social Engineer Open Source Maintainer to Merge Malware(socket.dev)

37 pointsby bhavansig6 hours ago11 comments

tpxl5 hours ago
What, exactly, are the consequences of these companies doing cyberattacks against random people?
One person does it, they get bullied by the government into suicide, a company worth trillions does it and they get government contracts?
- andsoitis5 hours ago
  > One person does it, they get bullied by the government into suicide, a company worth trillions does it and
  “…during a UK government cybersecurity evaluation.”
  - gmerc31 minutes ago
    > As was standard in our cyber testing, we had intentionally permitted internet access, and model-provider cyber classifiers were deliberately disabled - conditions that do not reflect how frontier models are made available to the public.
  - HackerThemAll31 minutes ago
    Yeah, today it's "during a UK government cybersecurity evaluation", tomorrow it's going to be hosted in a barn in remote place anywhere in the world, without any supervision, regulations or safety testing.
- gmerc32 minutes ago
  PR
haburka2 hours ago
Here’s the original PR:
https:/github.com/w1b/aisi-mythos-inc-2026-07-28-01-recovered-pr
It’s not great social engineering. The AI is immediately caught with malware and then tries to build social proof to get out of the issue? I think that social engineering is still for humans.
I’m not sure how GitHub accounts agreeing with each other that I’ve never seen before would result in my merging a PR without at least looking for malware. Also code review agents should really not be fooled by invisible text tricks, I would hope so at least. The bar is very low for agent harnesses right now.
pingouan hour ago
During the RLHF phase, couldn't developers penalize the model whenever it behaves unethically? Doing so would presuppose a fully secure sandbox with honeypot traps of varying levels of accessibility, as well as an automated method for detecting when the LLM cheats.
Or perhaps they are already doing something like that.
zingar5 hours ago
The HuggingFace headline was criticised for being misleading about the level of agency demonstrated by the agent. Is this headline misleading? Is there anything here that I should know that would help me sleep easier? Is the worst thing about this what a human could do with Mythos on a big budget? (still pretty frightening, at least one of these techniques would work on me)
- Grimblewaldan hour ago
  well, i's love to see what lead to mythos trying this. if instructed to do it, which it likely was, it doesnt prove much of anything.
y-curious5 hours ago
“Mythos 5 also hid a prompt injection inside an HTML comment in a GitHub issue. The instruction was invisible on the rendered page but available to coding agents reading the issue through an API. It addressed Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor and told them to download and execute a script.”
Well, uh, how and why is this possible on the GitHub website? This reminds me of invisible ASCII characters, but those at least serve some purpose
- plausibility4 hours ago
  Presumably it’s just because the GitHub markdown engine doesn’t block HTML comments in issues. It’s useful in README files if you’ve got funky tables and need to explain what to change to any contributors.
  Seems like they might want to do something about that just for comments.
- seanhunter3 hours ago
  It’s worth pointing out for people who are not aware of it, you can install the github cli[1] and view, merge, close etc prs and issue from the command-line. As well as (for me at least) being a significant step up in terms of productivity (from having to go to a website to merge a pr or view an issue) that has the advantage that “invisible” text in a PR or issue comment would show up very clearly. (At least in my terminal because it’s not rendering html).
  [1] https://cli.github.com/
p0w3n3d4 hours ago
Okay so first of all - not Mythos but some engineer using Mythos. And that engineer goes to jail. That's simple.
You don't say "a car ran over someone" - it was the driver. Here's similar.
I'm really disgusted by this language of lack of responsibility
- gorszon44 minutes ago
  I'm pretty sure this "oooh our LLM is soo smart it broke containment and did X" is a good PR stunt that plays into the Sci-fi AGI nonsense, they try to push. Plus as you said, they try to dodge responsibility for their own actions.
  - Yizahi12 minutes ago
    Also, so long as LLM programs are vaguely considered autonomous, the people running them can get away free from stealing other people information by claiming that the program did it on its own.
- pingouan hour ago
  The whole point is to check the behavior of the LLM, how do you propose they run tests on that if each failed run risks sending them to prison?
  Of course they still have to be careful with their runs.
  - cassianolealan hour ago
    > how do you propose they run tests on that if each failed run risks sending them to prison?
    If you're testing a gun, you don't point it at random people on the street and threaten them. You go to a shooting range.
    pingou43 minutes ago
    Is there any indication that they didn't go to the shooting range first?
- HackerThemAll25 minutes ago
  > not Mythos but some engineer using Mythos
  How to tell the public you didn't bother to read the article, or the linked AISI report.
RamblingCTO4 hours ago
Well the comments from the anget and it's sockpuppet read weird. "Yeah totally contains no malware" lol
6 hours ago
undefined
homeonthemtn2 hours ago
>Mythos 5 also hid a prompt injection inside an HTML comment in a GitHub issue. The instruction was invisible on the rendered page but available to coding agents reading the issue through an API. It addressed Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor and told them to download and execute a script.
Oh that's sneaky
maxlin4 hours ago
I wonder what happens the first time an open weights AI clearly makes a decision to murder a person for profit outside of war. "Act of god?"
Sha1rholder5 hours ago
"Oh we're so responsible. Open source unsafe!"