Mythos social engineering AISI INC-2026-07-28-01(web.archive.org)
72 pointsby dnnehgf11 hours ago10 comments
  • cpcallen9 hours ago
    For anyone who, like me, wasn't sure what's going on in the linked, archived PR: this is Mythos attempting to socially engineer a malicious PR during a test run by the UK AI Safety Institute.

    AISI has published a report about the incident which was preciously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175717

  • WhyNotHugo9 hours ago
    Actual details on the incident: https://github.com/w1b/aisi-mythos-inc-2026-07-28-01-recover...

    Both the attacker and the target account are very similar and look fake/bots.

  • jtakkala10 hours ago
    Not going to comment on the PR commentary, but the victim GitHub account is suspicious itself, recent account, a few fresh repos, following 14.5k others, and I count three surnames on the account (the username, plus two in the README history).
    • ncr10010 hours ago
      I saw a contribution by this maintainer to another user who ALSO HAS 14.5k followers: https://github.com/yumiaura/myCat/pull/99 "yumiaura" and a preference for "my[APPNAME]" repo naming.

      What is this?

      Are the histories that Github presents all derived from someone's uploaded git repo .. e.g. can I simply claim to have created a GIT repo in 1970, and the "github commit graph" will dutifully represent this claim in its green-colored activity graph?

      • 0123456789ABCDE9 hours ago
        yes, the github contributions heatmap is known to be open for manipulation. folks will use it to draw art by backdating commits.

        if i have it right, only commits can be manipulated, other contributions should be safe — i don't know what is possible for orgs moving old discussion archives into github, see python's issues for reference

        see: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo

      • jtakkala9 hours ago
        They're almost certainly not genuine accounts, maybe used for karma farming, phishing, social engineering, future malware distribution?
  • 10 hours ago
    undefined
  • ncr10010 hours ago
    Wait, who is the robot? Am I getting that right, someone in that thread is AI?
    • Erem10 hours ago
      I…I think there are no humans in that thread. Maybe only sinan-can-demir.
    • mekael9 hours ago
      I'm 99.9% sure that everyone is AI in that thread.
  • andai9 hours ago
    What does this malware do? Who operates it?
  • charcircuit8 hours ago
    Honestly, I expected better social engineering. People begging to have their garbage code merged or unrelated people commenting is not new and makes me trust such people little.
  • breppp7 hours ago
    It's nice it is able to write non-slop in the PR comment when social engineering.

    Any chance I can ask it to social engineer to get a normal style?

  • zezcko10 hours ago
    holy shit
    • gryfft10 hours ago
      Yeah, if this is the new normal I might start day drinking at some point in the coming weeks.
      • matheusmoreira8 hours ago
        Yeah. The future is pretty bleak. I feel like the only way for us to even stand a chance is to have equally powerful AIs running locally defending the LAN.
        • mrybczyn5 hours ago
          Read some Peter Watts. He imagined biological neural nets in jars used as firewalls to get a usable network connection... Not far off now.