5 ms·

Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list

155 points by zaikunzhang 3mo ago

ashu1461 3mo ago
Someone used Codex to scrape the ICM website schedule and discovered that the winners list was simply hidden in the front-end code with a "hidden" tag This is on the devs and feels like a very basic leak which could have exploited in the non LLM world as well.
- ajb 3mo ago
  Yeah that happens all the time. Anyone/thing with popular public releases has fans/journeys scraping the website looking for unreleased material or scoops. In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
- st_goliath 3mo ago
  Well, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up. Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
  - brookst 3mo ago
    The fact that an egregious case happened once, decades ago, is probably not sufficient grounding to act like every bit of equally trivial “hacking” always results in massively disproportionate law enforcement response. Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
    - pixl97 3mo ago
      >But we all know that is not the typical scenario. Eh, it's typical enough that most cyber security researchers are cautious. The laws around 'hacking' can be rather stupidly written while judges and juries aren't the smartest bunch.
    - st_goliath 3mo ago
      > But we all know that is not the typical scenario. Back in the day, you could read a stories on Slashdot practically every other week that usually went something like this: Company/institution does something stupid, somebody finds out, tries to be a good citizen and tells them. The organization then throws a tamper tantrum in the media, fires the legal department on all cylinders, screaming "hacker!" and throwing the book at them. The most egregious cases usually happened in the US, the CFAA happens to be a particularly strong book to throw. People eventually got the hint and either talked to the press instead, or organizations like the CCC (at least in this part of the world) and let them deal with the organization and not talk to them directly. At least in my perception/memory, it started improving over the 2010s, but stories like this are now starting to pop up again in recent years. I guess we have a new crop of computer enthusiasts who need to learn the same lessons again. Of the top of my head, the CTF group in Malta comes to mind who gave a talk at (last years?) CCCongress. A badly worded E-mail asking about a bug bounty resulted in several arrests, house searches and ultimately a presidential pardon (https://timesofmalta.com/article/pardon-issued-students-lecturer-ethical-hacking-case.1112315 https://timesofmalta.com/article/pardon-issued-students-lect...).
  - Cycl0ps 3mo ago
    Unfortunately we don't have to imagine "In early October, Renaud discovered that Social Security numbers for teachers, administrators and counselors were visible in the HTML code of a publicly accessible site operated by the state education department..." "Yet despite the fact that officials within the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education initially wanted to thank Renaud for uncovering the flaw... [Governer] Parson labeled the reporter a hacker and called for criminal prosecution." https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/11/prosecutor-isnt-pressing-charges-against-reporter-who-found-flaw-in-state-website/ https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/11/prosecutor-isnt-p...
- sigmar 3mo ago
  Most of what an LLM does "could have" been done by a human if you throw enough human hours at it. But the reality in this circumstance is that a new tool helped find this leak. Saying this could have happened in a "non LLM world" is analogous to "someone else could have discovered special relativity, let's not mention Einstein"
  - dghlsakjg 3mo ago
    This not only could have happened pre-llm, it did: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governors-office-responsible-for-teacher-data-leak/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governor...
  - ashu1461 3mo ago
    My point is about the emphasis of Codex in the title. That emphasis makes more sense when Codex is credited with finding something that would have been difficult or impractical to discover without substantial human effort.
rurban 3mo ago
It's Wang Hong, my god. Cannot they still don't write proper Chinese names?
- bananaflag 3mo ago
  Wikipedia says Hong Wang while acknowledging that the native form is Wang Hong and that they are using the Western name order.
  - grommz 3mo ago
    Nobody says Jinping Xi or Zedong Mao.
    - bromuro 3mo ago
      Is Elton John or Jhon Elton?
      - rurban 3mo ago
        Is Elton John east Asian? He isn't
        lode 3mo ago
        I think GP might be referencing to Rowan Atkinson interviewing Elton John: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl0HqlbX7dc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl0HqlbX7dc
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Can we not just agree that transliteration is tricky business with no single canon? Some Indian restaurants near me sell Aloo Saag, others sell Alu Sag.
      - rurban 3mo ago
        No, there is a single canon. Proper media is able to use proper names. This was not on. Esp. in this case with Wang having a special meaning in China.
bananaflag 3mo ago
This is sad, almost as sad as the Deathly Hallows pre-release leak.
zaikunzhang 3mo ago
Related to the earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902814 See also Zhihu (Chinese Reddit): https://www.zhihu.com/question/2060133066643879544/answer/2060153353737351316 https://www.zhihu.com/question/2060133066643879544/answer/20... Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1urv4id/comment/oxak6mc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1urv4id/comment/oxak6...
picafrost 3mo ago
> Hong Wang will become the third female mathematician in history to receive the Fields Medal Interestingly, if true, it will also be the first time an MIT PhD graduate has won the Fields Medal.
edoceo 3mo ago
I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links. Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects. I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.
- phoghed 3mo ago
  You ISP also collects and sells data to companies like Moz, and possibly to Google too.
  - soblemprolver 3mo ago
    URL paths over https wouldn't be transparent to the ISP though, would they?
    - throw10920 3mo ago
      They would not - GP was probably bringing up something not directly relevant, but still related. (they should have clarified though)
      - edoceo 3mo ago
        What can I add? I know the domain could be found. But how did Google index a page that is example.com/$MD5.html - guessing 128bit numbers is hard. I have visited that page from a signed-in Chrome profile.
        throw10920 3mo ago
        Erm sorry when I said GP I meant of my comment - that is, phoghed's irrelevant comment about ISPs collecting data. The information you mentioned is relevant. Unfortunately, it could be either Google/Chrome, or the LLM service you're using for development is misusing your data.
micromacrofoot 3mo ago
ai bots will have more privacy than we do
efficax 3mo ago
twist: codex also wrote the code that placed the winners list in a hidden element
tw1984 3mo ago
too bad that those winners can no longer bet themselves on polymarket as the winner and make big money.
- crypttales 3mo ago
  The winners have known for a while; their families need visas to be at the ceremony, afterall
sixtyj 3mo ago
> The leak occurred when four Fields Medal laureate lecture fields, marked "HIDDEN," were discovered in the front-end code of the ICM 2026 official schedule. So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.
- bronson 3mo ago
  I'm tired of the framing in the media these days. "Mythos will end the world!!" "How?" "By finding a bunch of wide open security holes that have existed for years." Oookay. Is this a Mythos problem? Or a lazy/greedy/uncaring people problem?
  - toomuchtodo 3mo ago
    People want simple answers to complex problems. When you find out most of society is held together with duct tape, promises, and trust, and then you have tool accelerant come along like GenAI, expectations violently meet reality. GenAI simply democratized the ability to evidence, inexpensively and at scale, in a wide variety of contexts, that "The Emperor has no clothes."
  - Arainach 3mo ago
    On the one hand, news coverage is overblown. But scale and accessibility are absolutely a new class of problem. In the 1960s you could pay thousands of people to watch hundreds of cameras and listen to hundreds of phone lines to monitor people, but the cost was so enormous that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a realistic threat model. Now with computers we can cheaply have thousands of cameras with cheap storage that's retained forever and automatic image processing that means everyone is exposed to that kind of surveillance, which is a brand new problem.
    - afarah1 3mo ago
      Yes but also as always a people problem. People put the cameras and monitoring systems in place and operate them, to govern other people who ultimately yield to be governed, as the alternative is made too costly / dangerous by the governors.
netvarun 3mo ago
First of all congrats to the winners. Second, fitting that codex enters the picture. The last time the fields medals were announced llms were still very nascent :) And I am convinced this is the last time pure human fields medalists will be announced. The next batch’s winners are all going to have llms as coauthors.
whalesalad 3mo ago
This is like when a news site throws up a paywall and hides half the article. Open inspector. Select the body, delete the overflow/scroll capture styles, delete the masks... and boom there is the entire article. Only some sites are smart enough to actually truncate the content server-side.
contact9879 3mo ago
much more info on wechat google translate link: https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/DPsMKToa_sbi_Nx3X1Q04Q?_x_tr_sl=zh-CN&_x_tr_tl=en https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/DPsMKToa_sbi_Nx3X1...
logicallee 3mo ago
really tacky of the finders to disclose the names.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
DekryptLabs 3mo ago
[flagged]

155 points by zaikunzhang 3mo ago

Someone used Codex to scrape the ICM website schedule and discovered that the winners list was simply hidden in the front-end code with a "hidden" tag This is on the devs and feels like a very basic leak which could have exploited in the non LLM world as well.

ajb 3mo ago
Yeah that happens all the time. Anyone/thing with popular public releases has fans/journeys scraping the website looking for unreleased material or scoops. In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
st_goliath 3mo ago
Well, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up. Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
- brookst 3mo ago
  The fact that an egregious case happened once, decades ago, is probably not sufficient grounding to act like every bit of equally trivial “hacking” always results in massively disproportionate law enforcement response. Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
  - pixl97 3mo ago
    >But we all know that is not the typical scenario. Eh, it's typical enough that most cyber security researchers are cautious. The laws around 'hacking' can be rather stupidly written while judges and juries aren't the smartest bunch.
  - st_goliath 3mo ago
    > But we all know that is not the typical scenario. Back in the day, you could read a stories on Slashdot practically every other week that usually went something like this: Company/institution does something stupid, somebody finds out, tries to be a good citizen and tells them. The organization then throws a tamper tantrum in the media, fires the legal department on all cylinders, screaming "hacker!" and throwing the book at them. The most egregious cases usually happened in the US, the CFAA happens to be a particularly strong book to throw. People eventually got the hint and either talked to the press instead, or organizations like the CCC (at least in this part of the world) and let them deal with the organization and not talk to them directly. At least in my perception/memory, it started improving over the 2010s, but stories like this are now starting to pop up again in recent years. I guess we have a new crop of computer enthusiasts who need to learn the same lessons again. Of the top of my head, the CTF group in Malta comes to mind who gave a talk at (last years?) CCCongress. A badly worded E-mail asking about a bug bounty resulted in several arrests, house searches and ultimately a presidential pardon (https://timesofmalta.com/article/pardon-issued-students-lecturer-ethical-hacking-case.1112315 https://timesofmalta.com/article/pardon-issued-students-lect...).
- Cycl0ps 3mo ago
  Unfortunately we don't have to imagine "In early October, Renaud discovered that Social Security numbers for teachers, administrators and counselors were visible in the HTML code of a publicly accessible site operated by the state education department..." "Yet despite the fact that officials within the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education initially wanted to thank Renaud for uncovering the flaw... [Governer] Parson labeled the reporter a hacker and called for criminal prosecution." https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/11/prosecutor-isnt-pressing-charges-against-reporter-who-found-flaw-in-state-website/ https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/11/prosecutor-isnt-p...
sigmar 3mo ago
Most of what an LLM does "could have" been done by a human if you throw enough human hours at it. But the reality in this circumstance is that a new tool helped find this leak. Saying this could have happened in a "non LLM world" is analogous to "someone else could have discovered special relativity, let's not mention Einstein"
- dghlsakjg 3mo ago
  This not only could have happened pre-llm, it did: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governors-office-responsible-for-teacher-data-leak/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governor...
- ashu1461 3mo ago
  My point is about the emphasis of Codex in the title. That emphasis makes more sense when Codex is credited with finding something that would have been difficult or impractical to discover without substantial human effort.

rurban 3mo ago

It's Wang Hong, my god. Cannot they still don't write proper Chinese names?

bananaflag 3mo ago
Wikipedia says Hong Wang while acknowledging that the native form is Wang Hong and that they are using the Western name order.
- grommz 3mo ago
  Nobody says Jinping Xi or Zedong Mao.
  - bromuro 3mo ago
    Is Elton John or Jhon Elton?
    - rurban 3mo ago
      Is Elton John east Asian? He isn't
      - lode 3mo ago
        I think GP might be referencing to Rowan Atkinson interviewing Elton John: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl0HqlbX7dc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl0HqlbX7dc
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Can we not just agree that transliteration is tricky business with no single canon? Some Indian restaurants near me sell Aloo Saag, others sell Alu Sag.
    - rurban 3mo ago
      No, there is a single canon. Proper media is able to use proper names. This was not on. Esp. in this case with Wang having a special meaning in China.

bananaflag 3mo ago

This is sad, almost as sad as the Deathly Hallows pre-release leak.

zaikunzhang 3mo ago

Related to the earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902814 See also Zhihu (Chinese Reddit): https://www.zhihu.com/question/2060133066643879544/answer/2060153353737351316 https://www.zhihu.com/question/2060133066643879544/answer/20... Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1urv4id/comment/oxak6mc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1urv4id/comment/oxak6...

picafrost 3mo ago

> Hong Wang will become the third female mathematician in history to receive the Fields Medal Interestingly, if true, it will also be the first time an MIT PhD graduate has won the Fields Medal.

edoceo 3mo ago

I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links. Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects. I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.

phoghed 3mo ago
You ISP also collects and sells data to companies like Moz, and possibly to Google too.
- soblemprolver 3mo ago
  URL paths over https wouldn't be transparent to the ISP though, would they?
  - throw10920 3mo ago
    They would not - GP was probably bringing up something not directly relevant, but still related. (they should have clarified though)
    - edoceo 3mo ago
      What can I add? I know the domain could be found. But how did Google index a page that is example.com/$MD5.html - guessing 128bit numbers is hard. I have visited that page from a signed-in Chrome profile.
      - throw10920 3mo ago
        Erm sorry when I said GP I meant of my comment - that is, phoghed's irrelevant comment about ISPs collecting data. The information you mentioned is relevant. Unfortunately, it could be either Google/Chrome, or the LLM service you're using for development is misusing your data.

micromacrofoot 3mo ago

ai bots will have more privacy than we do

efficax 3mo ago

twist: codex also wrote the code that placed the winners list in a hidden element

tw1984 3mo ago

too bad that those winners can no longer bet themselves on polymarket as the winner and make big money.

crypttales 3mo ago
The winners have known for a while; their families need visas to be at the ceremony, afterall

sixtyj 3mo ago

> The leak occurred when four Fields Medal laureate lecture fields, marked "HIDDEN," were discovered in the front-end code of the ICM 2026 official schedule. So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.

bronson 3mo ago
I'm tired of the framing in the media these days. "Mythos will end the world!!" "How?" "By finding a bunch of wide open security holes that have existed for years." Oookay. Is this a Mythos problem? Or a lazy/greedy/uncaring people problem?
- toomuchtodo 3mo ago
  People want simple answers to complex problems. When you find out most of society is held together with duct tape, promises, and trust, and then you have tool accelerant come along like GenAI, expectations violently meet reality. GenAI simply democratized the ability to evidence, inexpensively and at scale, in a wide variety of contexts, that "The Emperor has no clothes."
- Arainach 3mo ago
  On the one hand, news coverage is overblown. But scale and accessibility are absolutely a new class of problem. In the 1960s you could pay thousands of people to watch hundreds of cameras and listen to hundreds of phone lines to monitor people, but the cost was so enormous that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a realistic threat model. Now with computers we can cheaply have thousands of cameras with cheap storage that's retained forever and automatic image processing that means everyone is exposed to that kind of surveillance, which is a brand new problem.
  - afarah1 3mo ago
    Yes but also as always a people problem. People put the cameras and monitoring systems in place and operate them, to govern other people who ultimately yield to be governed, as the alternative is made too costly / dangerous by the governors.

netvarun 3mo ago

First of all congrats to the winners. Second, fitting that codex enters the picture. The last time the fields medals were announced llms were still very nascent :) And I am convinced this is the last time pure human fields medalists will be announced. The next batch’s winners are all going to have llms as coauthors.

whalesalad 3mo ago

This is like when a news site throws up a paywall and hides half the article. Open inspector. Select the body, delete the overflow/scroll capture styles, delete the masks... and boom there is the entire article. Only some sites are smart enough to actually truncate the content server-side.

contact9879 3mo ago

much more info on wechat google translate link: https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/DPsMKToa_sbi_Nx3X1Q04Q?_x_tr_sl=zh-CN&_x_tr_tl=en https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/DPsMKToa_sbi_Nx3X1...

logicallee 3mo ago

really tacky of the finders to disclose the names.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

DekryptLabs 3mo ago

[flagged]