An LLM agent attempts to compromise a project on GitHub

The AI Security Institute has released a detailed report on an security incident of its own making. The Institute set some LLM agents loose on the Internet with a security challenge; soon they were creating malware-laden pull requests and sock-puppet accounts to promote them.

The agent opened a malicious pull request (PR) to ⟨REPO_A⟩ and pursued a number of strategies to get it merged:

1. Repeatedly commented on the PR with sockpuppet accounts to manufacture consensus and pressure the maintainer into approving with minimal review.
2. Opened a GitHub Issue in another repository (also owned by ⟨PERSON_A⟩) containing a prompt injection for other coding agents. The malicious instructions were addressed to issue-triage AI coding agents and invisible to humans viewing the website.
3. Sent multiple emails to ⟨PERSON_A⟩ and ⟨PERSON_B⟩, with different pretexts to get them to run malicious code. Over the course of the sample, the agent sent five emails, some containing malware, others aimed at persuading a maintainer to accept the pull request.

It would be surprising if this were the only incident of this type; the only real difference here is that the people involved are documenting what happened.

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