> If everything is more bespoke the attack surface is smaller

This is exactly the problem that LLM assisted attacks solve. For a human attacker, the extra work to figure out a bespoke solution is too time consuming to be worth the effort. LLMs can search for vulnerabilities and spit out bespoke attacks like it's nothing. On top of this the bespoke solutions weakness leans heavily into the AI attackers advantage: response time. Even if they can just get your company's single Anthropic key, if they do it at 2am while your one infra person is on vacation, they have plenty of time to extract enough value for their effort.

I agree with the move to hyperscalers. The future (well, actually present) is going to be constantly seeing new attacks happening. The only real solution to this going to be having teams of people and agents constantly watching for these and able to deploy fixes and respond to risks immediately.

How is that ever going to work out? The speed of discovery for LLMs is so fast, these places are getting breached more often than not due to a human errors. Its really hard for machines, let alone humans, to guard against a lot of LLMs going against them 24x7.

This is absolutely happening. I'm not a developer in SV, I'm an IT leader out on customer land, and I can tell you a LOT of companies are looking to bring things back on prem for security and cost reasons. And before anyone laughs, yes, you ABSOLUTELY can save money going on prem, I've done it for company after company. It's one reason the PE firm that I've worked under for a decade kept moving me to new companies.

This is misguided thinking. You are less likely to hear about on-prem breaches in the news just because they are less likely to be newsworthy incidents, but they are even more likely to happen. Part of the reason people moved to the cloud is because it is much easier to have a team manage updates and security at scale.

Being a small target is not helpful these days, attacks on on-prem software today simply scans the internet, or uses databases by people who have already scanned it, and is automated.

On-prem software has not been spared from the recent spat of security incidents.

My comment[0] tries to explain the nuance and I would agree with you and both the GP in some sense.

For Entreprise, the shift will be towards hyperscalers as they want trust and less blame (Nobody got fired for picking AWS)

For consumers, we care about pricing and stability and control and we will move back to our own hardware or cheap VPS providers and self-host things.

The middle ground would be where the slight pain could be at in my opinion.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307410

It's probably both.

Cost of hacking a custom setup is going down rapidly. There was broad agreement that the PHP vulnerability was very difficult to exploit in practice. It took two hours for someone to get into Steal My Bitcoin. Apparently all they did was tell a decent model "go exploit that." AI isn't free but it's not that expensive.

No thats an old way of thinking because it assumes mass targets are better because hacking is a high effort activity. But with the automation of intellect the unpatched systems (which a much more numerous when everyone self hosts) is the key point.

Mass credential stealing is just the top funnel of hacking and (compatativly) isnt that lucrative - these credentials are then sold on the black markets to the next step of hackers who use them to exploit targets.

With unpatched systems and self hosting, this second group can just set an llm at a target and have a much higher chance of success without needing credentials

It would be a dream for the infiltration hackers to have everyone self host. Unpatched and miscondigured systems would be everywhere and LLM automation could make mass scanning them and exploiting them very attractive - not mass scanning and exploiting them for credentials stealing, no! For layer 2 stuff