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Mexican government breached by solo user with Claude, 150 GB exfiltrated
- Reaktornano 5mo agoAuthor here. Spent the last few weeks chasing down the AI-attributed attack cases that made the rounds this year, including the Mexican government breach, the "vibe hacking" story, the Algerian amateur. Basically trying to work out whether hacking is impacted by broader AI adoption or whether the press was running ahead of the evidence. On one side, Daniel Stenberg ran the gated Anthropic frontier model against curl on May 11. Five "confirmed" findings, one low-severity CVE after triage. His words: "the big hype around this model so far was primarily marketing." Stenberg is not a guy who hedges, and curl is not a toy codebase. On the other side, there's SCONE — Anthropic's own December 2025 benchmark. Agents exploited 19 of 34 post-cutoff smart contracts, 55.8% success, $4.6M in simulated funds at an average API cost of $1.22 per contract. The comparable number 12 months earlier was about 2%. Looks like agents are getting genuinely good at narrow, well-scoped vulnerability classes (Solidity, post-cutoff, bounded targets) and still bad at messy real-world codebases. But that's a guess and I'd rather hear pushback. Happy to get into methodology, the spots where Chainalysis, Immunefi, and Web3IsGoingJustGreat don't line up, or specific cases. 28 references at the end of the piece.
- refulgentis 5mo agoYou wrote the blog and this comment with Claude Opus. I'm sure you meant well and only used it for editing, etc. etc., and I agree AI is good. In any case, I can't trust AI on AI, especially with such a stark headline from someone outside Anthropic. (how do you know it was a solo user with Claude?) This is either breaking news that you for some reason delegated to an overly verbose post written by AI, or, its an almost-true-but-not-quite clickbait title, and I don't have the domain chops to know. Impossible spot to be in as a reader.
- Reaktornano 5mo agoThe body of this post is definitely an edited AI summary, original post not
- Reaktornano 5mo agoAll references here, do your own research: References [1] SecurityWeek, "Hackers Weaponize Claude Code in Mexican Government Cyberattack," Feb. 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.securityweek.com/hackers-weaponize-claude-code-in-mexican-government-cyberattack/ https://www.securityweek.com/hackers-weaponize-claude-code-i... [2] Anthropic, "Threat Intelligence Report: August 2025," Anthropic, Aug. 27, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/b2a76c6f6992465c09a6f2fce282f6c0cea8c200.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/b2a76c6f6992465c09a6f2fce282f6... [3] D. Stenberg, "Mythos finds a curl vulnerability," daniel.haxx.se, May 11, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-vulnerability/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v... [4] Trail of Bits and OpenZeppelin, "Arbitrum Research and Development Collective (ARDC) procurement-grade pricing benchmarks," 2024. Approximately $25,000 per engineer-week for senior smart-contract auditing. [5] W. Xiao, C. Killian, H. Sleight, A. Chan, N. Carlini, and A. Peng, "AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits," Anthropic Red Team / MATS / Anthropic Fellows program, Dec. 1, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://red.anthropic.com/2025/smart-contracts/ https://red.anthropic.com/2025/smart-contracts/ [6] P. Paganini, "Claude code abused to steal 150GB in cyberattack on Mexican agencies," SecurityAffairs, Feb. 2026. [Online]. Available: https://securityaffairs.com/188696/ai/claude-code-abused-to-steal-150gb-in-cyberattack-on-mexican-agencies.html https://securityaffairs.com/188696/ai/claude-code-abused-to-... [7] Immunefi, "2026 State of Onchain Security," Immunefi, Jan. 2026. 425 publicly disclosed exploits 2021-2025 totaling $11.9 billion; cumulative whitehat payouts exceed $110 million across 330+ projects and 45,000+ researchers. [8] Chainalysis, "2026 Crypto Crime Report," Chainalysis, Feb. 2026. 2025 stolen funds totaled $3.4 billion; cumulative DPRK take all-time, $6.75 billion. [9] M. White, "Web3 Is Going Just Great," web3isgoinggreat.com. (Cumulative loss tracker, broader scope including exchange and protocol collapses.) [Online]. Available: https://web3isgoinggreat.com https://web3isgoinggreat.com [10] Z. Wang, X. Chen, Y. Chen, et al., "Characterizing Ethereum Upgradable Smart Contracts and Their Security Implications," arXiv:2403.01290, Mar. 2024. (Measurement study covers 60,251,064 Ethereum smart contracts.) [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01290 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01290 [11] Flipside Crypto, "EVM Layer-2 deployment statistics," Flipside Crypto, 2024. More than 637 million EVM contracts across 7 L2 chains; Optimism alone hosted approximately 70% in 2024 YTD. [12] Etherscan, "Daily Verified Contracts Chart," etherscan.io. All-time peak of 602 verified Solidity contracts deployed in a single day in 2023. [Online]. Available: https://etherscan.io/chart/verified-contracts https://etherscan.io/chart/verified-contracts [13] Google Project Zero and Google DeepMind, "From Naptime to Big Sleep: Using Large Language Models To Catch Vulnerabilities In Real-World Code," Google Project Zero, Oct. 2024. [Online]. Available: https://projectzero.google/2024/10/from-naptime-to-big-sleep.html https://projectzero.google/2024/10/from-naptime-to-big-sleep... [14] N. Perry, M. Srivastava, D. Kumar, and D. Boneh, "Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?" in Proc. 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '23), Copenhagen, Denmark, Nov. 2023. 47 Stanford participants on codex-davinci-002. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622 [15] United States v. Eisenberg, No. 23 Cr. 10 (S.D.N.Y. May 23, 2025), Opinion and Order on Rule 29 Motion for Acquittal (Subramanian, J.), 35 pp. [Online]. Available: https://nysd.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/23cr10%20Opinion%20and%20Order.pdf https://nysd.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/23cr10... [16] E. Calvano, G. Calzolari, V. Denicolò, and S. Pastorello, "Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Pricing, and Collusion," American Economic Review, vol. 110, no. 10, pp. 3267-3297, Oct. 2020. [Online]. Available: v [17] S. Fish, Y. A. Gonczarowski, and R. I. Shorrer, "Algorithmic Collusion by Large Language Models," arXiv:2404.00806, Apr. 2024. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00806 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00806 [18] CoinDesk, "Attacker Drains $182M From Beanstalk Stablecoin Protocol," Apr. 17, 2022. See also PeckShield and Omniscia post-mortems documenting the flash-loan governance attack and emergencyCommit exploitation of BIP-18. [Online]. Available: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/04/17/attacker-drains-182m-from-beanstalk-stablecoin-protocol https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/04/17/attacker-drains-182... [19] The Block, "$24 million Compound Finance proposal passed by whale over DAO objections," Jul. 29, 2024. Proposal 289 vote: 682,191 in favor, 633,636 against. [Online]. Available: https://www.theblock.co/post/307943 https://www.theblock.co/post/307943 [20] DARPA, "AI Cyber Challenge marks pivotal inflection point for cyber defense," DARPA, Aug. 2025. Team Atlanta (Georgia Tech, KAIST, POSTECH, Samsung Research) won the $4 million top prize with the ATLANTIS cyber-reasoning system; 54 of 63 synthetic vulnerabilities discovered (86%) and 43 patched (68%) across 54 million lines of code. [Online]. Available: https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/aixcc-results https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/aixcc-results [21] CETaS, "Claude Mythos: What Does Anthropic's New Model Mean for the Future of Cybersecurity?" Centre for Emerging Technology and Security, The Alan Turing Institute, Apr. 2026. [22] Anthropic, "Responsible Scaling Policy v3.0," Anthropic, Feb. 2026. [23] European Parliament and Council of the European Union, "Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (AI Act)," Official Journal of the European Union, Jul. 12, 2024. Dual-use provisions in next implementation phase scheduled for August 2026. [24] National Institute of Standards and Technology, "AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0)," NIST AI 100-1, Jan. 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework https://www.nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework [25] AI Safety Institute (UK), "The Last Ones: 32-Step Corporate-Network Attack Simulation," AI Safety Institute, Apr. 2026. [26] V. Buterin, "The Promise and Challenges of Crypto + AI Applications," vitalik.eth.limo, Jan. 30, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/30/cryptoai.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/30/cryptoai.html [27] Lido DAO, "Dual Governance — Lido Improvement Proposal LIP-28," Lido Finance. Activated on Ethereum mainnet, Jun. 30, 2025. 1% TVL "first seal" threshold and 10% TVL "rage-quit" threshold. Built with audits by Certora, OpenZeppelin, Statemind, and Runtime Verification; agent-based simulations by Collectif Labs; game-theoretic models by 20squares. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/lidofinance/lido-improvement-proposals/blob/develop/LIPS/lip-28.md https://github.com/lidofinance/lido-improvement-proposals/bl... [28] Anthropic, "Disrupting the First Reported AI-Orchestrated Cyber Espionage Campaign (GTG-1002)," Anthropic, Nov. 13, 2025. Approximately 30 targets across technology, finance, chemicals, and government sectors. [Online]. Available: https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage
- Barbing 5mo agoDo you have a dictation app? Hit us with your train of thought on this, how you’ve spent the last few weeks and the impact. Will be glad to read.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago> On the other side, there's SCONE — Anthropic's own December 2025 benchmark. Agents exploited 19 of 34 post-cutoff smart contracts, 55.8% success, $4.6M in simulated funds at an average API cost of $1.22 per contract. The comparable number 12 months earlier was about 2%. Anthropic has a vested interest in making their LLMs look advanced, powerful and dangerous. This is the company that is explicitly pro-regulation, who has donated $20M to a PAC for pro-regulation candidates, and whose own competitors accuse of being pro-regulatory capture. We should take their benchmarks and their "Mythos is too dangerous for you mere mortals" statements with a big ass grain of salt, because it plays directly into that regulation angle they're playing. Anthropic wants frontier model development locked up, with only a few select stewards of humanity holding the keys.
- adampunk 5mo ago>Beep-boop, I am a robot.
- meisterfeister 5mo agoA bit too obviously written by Claude ...
- pixel_popping 5mo agoThank you.
- hunterpayne 5mo agoThe golden age of net security is here... Both the defense is weaker due to LLMs and attacks become stronger and cheaper. Bad combination for the rest of us.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> Both the defense is weaker due to LLMs and attacks become stronger Are you claiming that LLMs are better at offensive security than defensive security? Or somehow that the offensive actors have access to better LLMs than people using them to defend? Otherwise it'd seem like the playing field just went up for both sides, unless one is famously lagging behind because no like to pay for better security? But that's also nothing new.
- YZF 5mo agoThe question is whether LLMs write more secure code than humans. If we get a lot of vibe coded software coming online by non-SWEs do we think that would be more or less secure?
- teaearlgraycold 5mo agoDefense is weaker because of vibe coding. Computer security is asymmetric. Attacking is easier than defending. Attackers need to find one hole in the security. Defenders need to patch every hole.
- overgard 5mo agoEven if defense keeps up it kind of depends on entities keeping up to date.. complex software stacks can make that hard, or falling behind a major version, etc. I think defense is harder than offense in this era
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jesse_ash 5mo agoIMO the assumption is probably that, with LLMs generally, software complexity and surface area going up faster than we're tackling it through hardening, testing, etc. - even with the help of defensive models. I would also imagine bad actors are in the majority, and so we're seeing restrictions on models like Mythos in an attempt to balance the field a bit.
- throwaway27448 5mo agoWhy mention claude?
- Reaktornano 5mo agoCoz attacker used Claude according to reports
- Barbing 5mo agoWhich link states it was one solo attacker, please?
- Reaktornano 5mo agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-25/hacker-used-anthropic-s-claude-to-steal-sensitive-mexican-data https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-25/hacker-us... another ref
- throwaway27448 5mo agoSo if the tool is so influential, why mention the attacker? Lone wolf attacks are bog standard, yea? Is it the person or the tool that is the problem?
- Reaktornano 5mo agoFor a tool to be threatening, you need a malicious operator at the moment. Or at least I hope so.
- throwaway27448 5mo agoThis hasn't stopped years and years of bleating about "AI safety", whatever that refers to.
- yieldcrv 5mo agoThere should be more investment in the exfiltration space because it is already set up to punt liability around like corporations The person using Claude to find the exploit clearly has a paper trail, so therefore they do not exploit. They sell the exploit to someone else and this is a profitable venture - not a crime. The person that has to disintermediate liability from actually exploiting, does not use the found data, they just sell the data - not a crime - instead of expand the liability surface and anonymity leaking by using the data. In fact they may even just leave the hole in the system open for someone else to exfiltrate. The person that steals from people with the found data, they don't just drop the money in their bank account, they hire mules in "work from home" jobs to have them use their own banking credentials themselves to make accounts to launder or convert the money exploited back to crypto exchanges and onchain. This supply chain is pretty robust, might as well see what the market values it at, as shares.
- royal__ 5mo agoThis is written by AI
- 3dahG 5mo ago"Blockchain Founder, Web3, AI and Economics Researcher" The whole "article" is AI generated and insufferable. Do prompters like this one expect us to verify each slop assertion (repeated 10 times on average) ourselves?
- fn-mote 5mo agoMeta: title is inaccurate, contradicted by sources. Possibly LLM summarizer confused Algerian solo hacker with the group cited in reference 1. Article is written by AI. Is this grounds for flagging?