GoKawiil
Tech News
A single attacker has reportedly breached hundreds of websites, with reports indicating the hacker used AI agents to automate and scale the intrusions. The incident suggests that tools once requiring a team of skilled operators can now be run by one person leveraging AI automation.
A security researcher at NorForge, Snorre Fagerland, discovered that a Chinese-speaking hacker exploited exposed instances of the open-source AI platform Carin to direct autonomous agents against corporate websites, breaching more than 100 of them, including those of Deere and SharkNinja. The hacker issued fewer than 100 Chinese-language commands, yet the agents attempted intrusions on over 1,200 sites across the US, Canada, Australia and Japan as of mid-October.
A blogger shared that after their post was submitted to Hacker News, their website experienced a flood of traffic attributed to AI bots rather than human readers. The author noted the spike coincided with the HN submission but consisted largely of automated crawler activity.
The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned eight members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua for running ATM jackpotting attacks that drained millions of dollars from machines across the United States using malware such as Ploutus. The group is led by Anibal Alexander Canelon Aguirre, alias 'Prometheus,' an FBI Ten Most Wanted fugitive accused of developing the Ploutus malware, alongside six named associates. OFAC also blacklisted seven TRON cryptocurrency addresses linked to roughly $6.1 million in stolen funds.
Hacker News has posted its monthly 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?' thread for October 2026, inviting companies to list open roles directly rather than through recruiters or job boards. Posting rules require location details, remote-work status, and a brief company description for lesser-known firms, with posters expected to actively respond to applicants.
Dutch authorities have arrested a man identified as Van der Stap as part of an investigation into the Shiny Hunters hacking group, according to KrebsOnSecurity. Van der Stap had previously served prison time for data theft and extortion and had publicly rebranded himself as a reformed hacker working in offensive security.
A developer named ahmd-sh has released Hntui, an open-source terminal application (TUI) for reading Hacker News. The tool supports all six HN feeds, comment navigation, post saving, vim and mouse controls, and multiple themes, and is installable as a standalone binary or via Bun.
A satirical piece presents a 'Skill.md' file that instructs readers to roll a six-sided die to determine which stereotypical Hacker News comment to post, regardless of the article's actual content. Each of the six outcomes parodies a familiar commenter archetype, from the nitpicker who quotes a tangential weak sentence to the Silicon Valley name-dropper and the credentialed pedant who gets the concept wrong anyway. The piece functions as comedic commentary on recurring patterns in online tech-forum discourse rather than a real software tool or news event.
A user posted an 'Ask HN' thread soliciting recommendations for research paper abstracts that readers found memorable or well-written. The poster explained they want inspiration for writing a compelling introduction to their own paper rather than a generic one.
A New York Times investigation found multiple harassment and rape allegations connected to Silicon Valley hacker houses, including AGI House in Hillsborough, where police logged 37 incidents since 2022, at least 17 tied to parties. In one December case, a woman called police at 2 a.m. from a Lyft saying a male resident had tried to force her into sex before she escaped by climbing a gate. AGI House founder Jeremy Nixon, who also founded an earlier house called Genesis, previously described his vision of housing 20 AI hackers together for three months.
A hobbyist repurposed an idle LILYGO T5 4.7-inch e-paper module, built around an ESP32 chip, to create a static home dashboard using Claude Code. The device displays local temperature and humidity readings, curated tech news pulled from sources like Hacker News, and astronomical event data such as occultations and eclipses relevant to telescope observation.
A physics PhD candidate who posted a 'Who wants to be hired?' listing on Hacker News describing skills in C++, CUDA, GPU programming and LLM inference was contacted by multiple unrelated people, each pitching the same senior software engineering role at one company with a different referral code attached. The job's referral program reportedly pays $1,500 per successful hire, and the messages appeared to use keyword matching and AI-generated personalization rather than genuine assessment of fit.