GoKawiil
Tech News
At DEF CON 34's Bug Bounty Village, Intigriti's Inti De Ceukelaire showed how AI support agents can be manipulated into leaking secrets, sending phishing emails, or performing unauthorized actions. Using prompt injection and email transcript spoofing rather than traditional scanning tools, he collected over $50,000 in bug bounties within a few weekends.
Security researcher Bill Swearingen showcased a reinforcement-learning system at DEF CON that generates geometric patterns capable of fooling object-detection AI, including systems built on the popular YOLO framework. He tested the patterns against 11 face- and person-detection models, successfully lowering confidence scores or evading detection entirely, while companies like Cap_able and Urban Privacy already sell clothing woven with similar disruptive designs.
An essay contrasts two mindsets in security engineering: those who treat security as a personal identity built around cleverness and outsider status, versus those focused on systemic, structural defense work. The piece argues that the hacker ethos of prizing surprising vulnerability discoveries, while culturally dominant and rewarded at conferences and in careers, biases the field toward reactive discovery rather than durable prevention.