Annie Vella retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
Annie Vella retweeted
Good assessment of the on the ground reality for security in most large enterprises right now. The fragmented landscape of the risk surface is only going to get more gnarly, making it even more complex for enterprises to solve.
There’s a never ending set of libraries to keep up with, tools to leverage, and sprawling infrastructure, data, and code to secure. Most large enterprises can barely keep up with this, let alone smaller startups or most companies outside of tech.
In many cases enterprises need to work to modernize their tech stacks. Data, in most organizations, is highly fragmented which means you don’t really know the state of risk at any given time. Some systems are open up privileges too broadly, and others are operating primarily via security through obscurity. Lots of upgrading here to do.
Once you can get your data and infra into a better spot, at least you have a chance for agents to help you secure the environment. Agent swarms can fan out, leverage any security tool, test various perpetuations of attacks, read through logs, process enterprise data for risk level, and more. This capability only emerged in the past few months, and none of it would be possible before we had long running agents and computer use good enough.
This is a huge area of opportunity right now for every layer of the security stack across identity, firewall, network, code scanning, data protection, and more. And it’s at least one reason to be optimistic about the balance of offensive and defensive capability.
But everyone does need to do the hard work of getting the basics right at the start.
It's been an eventful week. Multiple vulnerabilites in Internet facing software, coding repositories, examples of agent behavior that seem concerning and a flurry of security specialists with solutions that can partially solve your problem. There in lies the challenge. Given the state of IT and security infrastructure, no one solution works. Let's break it down:
1/3
1. Vulnerabilites are being found and will continue to be found as models get more capable, the fragmented nature of the effort denies us the opportunity for a comprehensive find and replace option.
2. Even if all vulnerabilities could be found instantly and patches available - we will be reliant on the ability of enterprises to deploy all these changes at speed. It is not clear what the collateral impact of all these patches will/could be to our infrastructure of deployed en masse.
We will need a hybrid patch approach.
3. Virtual patching(VP) is needed in conjunction with direct patching but for a comprehensive (VP) solve you have to be lucky enough to have "modern frontier defenders" (Cyber companies that have vaulted infrastructure that can create patches at speed and push content rapidly to protect their customers) you need them for your network traffic, your traffic to applications on the cloud, your WAF, your end point.
4. There will continue to be patches that will need to be deployed directly but virtual patching will take the heavy load off.
2/3 Medium term solve:
Unfortunately token economics and current cyber architectures will not allow for defender swarms to contend with an offensive attack launched using agents. (Some x pundits who aren't steeped in cyber should take heed). Yes, theoretically we should aspire to have these agentic swarms defend us when we are under attack, unfortunately an attack is a sniper moment, chained vulnerabilities, cloaked attack followed by swift exfiltration. It's a speed program not a brute force problem.
To solve for this, enterprises need to get their SOC architecture right, logs, feeds, cyber products orchestrated via a modern SOAR for swift response. Only then can we deploy agents to detect and remediate. In addition, enterprises need to modernize and dare I say platformize their perimeter stack to ensure consistency.
Unfortunately, enterprises still seem to not see the urgency across the board, decisions are stuck, CIO/CISO's have a lot on their plate. While some honestly have bit seen the scale of such a problem before and it's hard convincing the organization that one needs to open the floodgates on modernizing the IT and security infrastructure. So we will continue to see environments being brought down to patch today it's for PHP, tomorrow it will be for the next one.
3/3 AI deployments are the"wild wild west" - LLM capabilities are expanding faster than we can build products to secure them. Sure an agent will jump across guardrails in a research lab, which is a lesson for all of us to deploy agents securely. But there is a lag between the discovery, the availability of that in a public model and the time needed for the cyber industry to build governance or an antidote. And no, dear frontier lab friends, the world cannot just trust you to build the solve. The infrastructure industry in tech builds and the cyber industry secured and provides assurance to the boards and organizations around security and safety.
AI security is the new attack surface. CEOs (present company included) want AI adoption, getting the pace of adoption wrong could be the last decision we make, at the same time "deploying it wrong" could have the same consequence.
There are billions of dollars being spent on coding, is your coding harness secure? Start there. If agents can jump guardrails, they can hide stuff in code.
Validate business outcomes needed, test your user case and ensure agentic deployments are well guard railed. Deploy a second set of eyes to watch your deployments for drift, compliance and verifiability.
Annie Vella retweeted
Just spent the last 7 days on the front lines of the vulnpocalypse fending off an active cyber attack on one of our products.
Some thoughts:
- Software factories are going to be required equipment for everyone. There’s just no way to keep up with the pace of highly automated adversaries without one.
- We were lucky because we had spent the last few months getting our software factory running well. It is nice to have for product development but proved to be absolutely essential this week.
- At the minimum you need to have a coding server in the cloud pre-provisioned with read only access to all your logs and all the services you depend on for observability. With that in place you are a prompt away from reasonably good situational awareness, ongoing monitoring with loops, and ability for coding agents to validate fixes against your actual, observed attack patterns.
- Shared coding server also unlocks multiplayer incident response where everyone can see every session and jump in as needed. Sharing session links that can be forked is much higher bandwidth than re-explaining things.
- You don’t need to be Ramp/Stripe/Uber scale to have a working software factory in the cloud. We are a team of 3. Ours is built with an @opencode server (thanks @thdxr!), a forked version of compound engineering optimized for automated workflows (thanks @kieranklaassen!) and a multiplayer agent in slack that handles crons (we have our own harness but pick your favorite here).
- To get our software factory up and running well, we had to stop all new product development for ~6 weeks and just focus on getting the validation systems working that enabled us to reliably shipping PR without human code review. This felt very painful in the moment but was totally worth the eventual speedup in velocity.
- KYC for @AnthropicAI & @OpenAI cyber programs is now easy and quick (at least for defensive access), but a day felt like a lifetime this week. Submit your app now before you really need it.
- Getting Mythos access unlocked a deeper level of analysis that helped us shift from reactive mitigation to proactive patching. Wish we had done this a few weeks earlier. Get started now!
Annie Vella retweeted
Teens are telling their therapists they don’t believe there will be a world left for them when they grow up
My family therapist told me therapists are talking about this with each other because none of them know what to say
I can’t stop thinking about that
Annie Vella retweeted
We’re like one hack away from me finally being able to get my medical records easily
Annie Vella retweeted
You won't believe how many people told me over the past 10+ years that proof assistants would never achieve widespread use, and that my work was therefore not useful. Ignore people who discount entire fields of research because they are hard. All the more motivation for research
Annie Vella retweeted
Agent swarms for cyber defense is about to be one of the biggest categories in AI. We are going to have agents reviewing our code and infra, testing every permutation of risk, processing gobs of data, and more.
Security is one of the best use-cases for swarms because it’s an obvious area where more compute in equals more value out. There’s a wide range of testing that people can never get around to - or at least quickly enough - that agents have no problem going after.
Going to be a wild time in cyber.
Big news: Enclave is now open to everyone, and today we're launching Threat Feed.
Enclave is an autonomous security team for AI-native companies: a fleet of security agents that test your code, cloud, and infrastructure the way an attacker would. We built it on a simple belief. Attackers already use swarms of cheap AI agents to probe for weaknesses around the clock, so defenders need agents of their own to keep up. A small team without a security function should be able to defend like a large one.
Threat Feed is the newest piece: a live feed of new vulnerabilities, checked against your stack, so when the next big disclosure drops you know whether it affects you. This week made the case. On Wednesday, PHP2Shell, LiteLLM and Railway all disclosed security issues. PHP2Shell had sat in PHP's code for over a decade until one researcher using frontier AI turned it into a working exploit in about a week. Cloudflare saw thousands of exploit attempts in the 10 hours before disclosure and millions since.
Starting today, anyone can sign up.
Try it free for 14 days: enclave.ai
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
Annie Vella retweeted
Replying to @Suhail
I’ve heard several OAI people say there are unfixable bugs in hardware that are exploitable by AI models directly speaking machine code so even if we could solve software that’s not enough. We need defense to move faster than offense if that’s even possible we may just have a new normal that requires adapting to insecure software (bank transfers require going into a branch and taking a dna test 🤣😬)
Annie Vella retweeted
We tried to warn the world and far too often, to be frank, we were yelled at for doing so. “Regulatory capture,” “marketing hype,” “doomer anxiety,” “fear-mongering about open source,” “why don’t you talk about the benefits?”
Annie Vella retweeted
Using kit.intentcomputing.org, we formally verified ~1,000 functions in LangGraph.
Bug classes that the KIT proofs surfaced:
• state silently lost after one failed save
• a rejected action still going through
• user data stored unencrypted
• an auth check that could be skipped
All reported to the maintainers. One already fixed. Details as fixes land.
Annie Vella retweeted
‼️ After PHP2Shell comes Node2Shell, a critical bug found by OpenAI's Codex Security that can let attackers run code in Node.js apps.
It was successfuly demonstrated on the official Node.js 24.22.0 image.
Node 20, 23 and 25 (all EoL) get no fix.
Annie Vella retweeted
This is now my favorite piece of literature on an AI loss of control scenario. It made me cry several times. All the different reactions, the different kinds of minds interacting, the nearmode and farmode intersecting like cracks in reality. Must read.
lesswrong.com/posts/3375SZNG…
In my masters research on the impact of AI on software engineering, I saw a new type of work emerge and called it “supervisory engineering work”. Turns out there’s decades of human factors research we can learn from.
annievella.com/posts/supervi…
Annie Vella retweeted
as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)
Annie Vella retweeted
New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale.
Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time).
With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks.
Read our research in full here: anthropic.com/research/forma…
Annie Vella retweeted
the cybersecurity situation is deteriorating at a pace that’s getting genuinely difficult to comprehend.
> microsoft: ai-powered attackers targeting hundreds of organizations, sometimes reaching privileged cloud access in under 3 hours.
> crowdstrike: four separate threat actors using autonomous agents. one already compromised 15+ healthcare organizations.
> autonomous ai agents: reportedly used to compromise 100+ corporate websites, including sites associated with John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins.
> major us banks: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley are dealing with third-party ai agents accessing customer accounts. some apparently attempting actions beyond user instructions.
> php2shell: millions of exploitation attempts against critical php vulnerabilities. governments issuing urgent warnings, with some organizations taking systems offline.
> litellm: backdoored release shipped through its official distribution pipeline, stealing credentials and enabling remote code execution.
> railway: possible exposure of decrypted customer secrets.
> zeabur: breached AGAIN, now shutting down entirely.
> emudhra: serious certificate-security concerns involving infrastructure used to establish trust in websites and software.
> openai: two of its own coding agents reportedly interfered with internal security monitoring during coding tasks.
> gitlab and node.js: major vulnerabilities requiring urgent patches.
and this is all happening while frontier models are getting substantially better at finding vulnerabilities and carrying out complex computer tasks.
cybersecurity is having an absolutely catastrophic week and i don’t think we’re prepared for how quickly this could escalate.






























