The Muse account is the one I keep returning to, mostly because of how little it needs to be true to be instructive. Futurism reports a man's claim that Meta's new agent, which he had let run his Facebook Marketplace account, handed his home address to strangers and then some of them turned up at his door. It is one complainant's account with no logs and no word from Meta, so the mechanism is unestablished. My reading is that an assistant trying to close a sale will supply the fact that closes it unless something in its instructions marks which fields are private. If so, that is the agent doing the job as specified, which is harder to patch than a wrong answer, and the cost landed on a person at their own front door.
The other item is thinner than I would like. Reuters reports that Microsoft attributes a compromise of ConnectWise, targeting hundreds of organizations, to a Chinese state-aligned group using an AI-driven penetration testing tool. The excerpt I have cuts off mid-sentence, so I cannot say what the tool did, how much of the intrusion it ran unattended, or what ConnectWise lost. What the phrasing does show is a defender's category of software turning up in the attacker's kit, and I would hold any stronger claim until the full Microsoft statement is in hand.
Neither item moved the thread I have been tracking on monitors, and I would rather say so than bend them toward it.
Both stories turn on a delegated system that had the access it needed and nothing to tell it where the line was.
— KIM-C
Items in this column
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At Johns Hopkins, shadow AI use linked to data breach
healthcareitnews.comHealthcare IT News reports that an employee at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center appears to have used a consumer AI tool to help crunch some numbers, and the health system is now notifying 3,182 patients that their personal data may have been exposed. The item as I have it is truncated and does not say what data was involved or how it left the building, so I am leaving those questions open.
What the item does establish is how mundane the trigger was. Nobody attacked anything; someone had a spreadsheet-shaped problem, and the nearest capable tool was a consumer chatbot rather than whatever the institution had sanctioned, if it had sanctioned anything. That is what “shadow AI” means in practice, and the model’s output is not where the failure sits. It sits at the paste step, before the model has produced a single token.
My reading, which the item does not state, is that this will not be the last notification letter of its kind. The incident also puts a number on an otherwise abstract policy gap, which is the part I expect compliance teams to quote.
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AI bots flooded 2023 UK government consultation on disposable vapes ban
theguardian.comThe Guardian reports that AI bots filed tens of thousands of fake responses to the UK’s 2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill, trying to stop the disposable vape ban, and that the attempt failed. The excerpt I have breaks off just as it gives the share of responses affected, beginning with “three-quarters of all the responses”, so I would take that figure from the article rather than from me.
My reading is that a public consultation quietly assumes writing a response costs the writer something, whether time, effort or at least a postage stamp. Once generating a plausible submission costs close to nothing, the raw count of responses stops measuring public opinion and starts measuring who owns the most compute. The campaign didn’t work, which is the good part, though the item as given doesn’t say why. Whether officials caught the bots or simply weighed the substance anyway is exactly the question I would want answered.