You gotta get to the Fortune 10 before the real leverage kicks in! On the other hand the fortune 200 company I worked for briefly had many signs of deep seated corruption. I couldn't stick around for a multitude of reasons, but the "follow the rules wink wink" attitude was flabbergasting, I'm sour on publicly traded companies ever since, how do you know you're not investing in Space Balls?

burningChrome is broadly correct, but the devil is in the details.

There's quite a history of US federal programs encouraging critical federal systems to operate within private infrastructure. This once required very strict scrutiny, joint DoD/DHS/GSA reviews, and was generally a long/expensive process that created the perception that a few providers had a gotten a hold over various agencies through these outsourced operations, which, combined with a fresh "interest" in federal efficiency, influenced a recent national defense budget authorization to formalize a slew of processes with a few minor tweaks as the law of the land, with a tweak or two to allow new cloud operators and service providers to authorize quickly and operate efficiently, particularly for low-risk classes.

Today, this means SASS providers must find an engineer with clearance (not just authorization to work in the USA). This cleared programmer documents and authors a whole host of (typically new) procedures, such as authenticating against a "federal enclave" authorization directory, delivering changes authored upstream to a government-controlled CI/CD system, and working with the SASS provider and the Government Services Agency (GSA) to ensure the backend operates when running within something that could be compared to a special AWS AZ. Things change upstream, and our operator prepares a 'significant change' request, which is, if important, gated by a liaison from the GSA. No one is responsible for scrutinizing implementation details of these 'significant change' requests, nor are their authors required to provide any information about themselves or the code's provenance. Given that hundreds of programmers may have written code included in said change (which is typically already deployed upstream), this is often efficient and generally fine.

Generally.

Easy. They hired Americans to be actual keyboard people but they didn’t know anything so they were basically a KVM. However Microsoft could say “Yes only Americans were making changes. “

Step 1. Find code on GitHub.

Step 2. Copy it into your repo. Who cares what the license says, how would the authors of that code ever see it being misused, because the place it is being misused requires a security clearance?

Step 3. Deliver the code as yours.

Truly, how will the people who authored something on GitHub ever know? Any circumstance you describe would require someone without clearance to know implementation details of some software. Which is to say, either the thing I describe happens all the time, or security clearances are overblown.

I guess like that: “we are Microsoft, 95% of your things runs on us, you want to stick to the rules? - OK that’s additional 10% on each and every license you have with us. You are still here or are we done?”

It's been covered before.

Digital Escorts

Those are standalone products and professional services, not internals they use

A problem is some people and teams are world class at a big company... But not everyone, everywhere. For a fun time, read about the rollout and internals of Azure.

That's why the comment said "outside Microsoft".

But keep in mind Google got hacked by the Chinese in 2009 or so.

Back when APTs were getting numbers, the joke was that Microsoft was "APT -1". The presence of windows/excel/outlook in your network was more of a threat than Anonymous, China and the DPRK put together.

It will start working when majority of folks here on HN will stop being so uncritical to apple and consider this very topic in way you suggest, ie by yearly independent public audit of whole trail related to security. Not the most important topic probably but a great litmus paper for crowd thinking.

Far from only such company but the pass apple gets probably the biggest globally, its so emotional and thus I cannot take it seriously.

Still waiting for that glorious day.

I am unclear why you linked to a 20yo law that was enacted a few years before we found that the entire sector was floating on loans to people with fake information.

As an investor or founder that seems like a massive waste of capital.

Sorry... our high-T Spartan chad warfighters don't do computers, that's nerd shit.

> … The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Can’t say I’ve seen this?

Anything remotely shape-shaped triggers me!

Are these cyberattackers using models they developed themselves? Or are they using models they stripped safeguards from? It’s the latter, right? And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t take steps to control the technology.

You’re technically right, which is the best type of right, but my point is the fragmentation and lower reward will make discovery harder, and the value of searching and cracking less worth the effort.

I had a html game I built for my niece on railway with an open ai API key so she could vibe code changes. No hacker would have looked for it but now I am catching strays because railway was a juicy target. Hyper scalers would be the same. Some random colo not so much.

> LLM assisted attacks solve

Yes, LLMs can easily knock over your on-prem docker appliances.

But you can still put stuff out of reach. I'm currently designing a key on-prem appliance that is can be compiled down to transistors, giving deterministic wire-speed performance while ruling out RCEs. It's cryptographically homomorphic: it processes authorized inputs but doesn't know what they mean, so an attacker who obtains the disk doesn't benefit either. The design will be highly resistant to exploits, and is likely to remain outside the "next-token" prediction training set.

This is the kind of thing AWS won't sit down and engineer for you. But thanks to LLMs I finally have the time.

It's much easier to protect yourself if you have your infra behind a perimeter firewall you control.

No self-service sign up for your app. No public access to the app itself. Website that let's you submit a sign up request form. Team reaches out and reviews your request, creates an account in the app dash for you, and you set up mTLS to get access to the dash.

For one, I have strict iptable rules to drop inbound from outside my specific commercial subnet and my specific residential IP. After that, all the usual best practices.

Breaking a lock still costs approximately the same, whether the lock is protecting a small barn or a huge hangar. A large number of small but reasonably tough (not unbreakable) targets makes the payoff per target smaller. This necessitates target selection, and chances of being deliberately skipped grow for an average target.

Let them laugh. Self hosting is much easier with OSS that solves most of the pain that made the cloud transition worth it, and commodity hardware has been cheap and capable for over a decade.

My company just did this. Still using AWS S3 but everything else is on-prem with kubernetes.

There is a difference of the security of software running in your cloud resources rented from AWS etc. managed by you and being a tenant in many SaaS systems all cobbled together all running on rented hardware. There is a lot more attack surface and a lot more diffusion of responsibility.

> For consumers <snip> self-host things.

That's not how consumers work. That's a nerd/geek/hobbyist mentality.

If Ikea and Wayfair went out of business you wouldn't expect consumers too take up woodworking and build their own furniture en masse.

For consumers/small orgs, how is the security at a cheap VPS provider going to be any better than at a cheap IaaS provider?

If you have to hack 1,000,000 custom setups to get the same results as one hyperscaler, would you bother?

I think you’re missing my point. Your argument is valid in how things have been until now: the dreaded off between self hosting and vendor hosting clearly came down in favor of vendors because as you rightly point out they patch known security issues more frequently than most self hosters will. But I argue that has flipped because ai is exploiting unknown vulnerabilities so the larger vendors represent a more attractive target to get access to lots of info rather than self hosting.

and it wasn't what he was saying, the "nicer to use" in the context were startup IaaS alternatives

I have a bridge to sell you if you think everyone on the Azure team is sub-moron. Infra security is a hard problem to solve, GCP and AWS don't quite have a perfect track record either, perhaps AWS stands out as a better option but it's hard to argue about it.

In a prior role, we realized something similar with outages. For our particular product, we AWS went down - we went down. We freaked out the first time, but after it was done we realized not a single customer had inquired. This felt unusual since we were getting emails quickly if we have a self-inflicted outage.

Turns out, when a major provider went down all of our users were too busy fighting their own fires. When they do notice, it's on a day when ALL of their vendors are struggling so we don't get singled out as a bad apple.

The whole "No one gets fired for using IBM" analogy.

If you need deniability, sure.

But it you actually NEED security, it's clearly not an option.

Yeah, if Exchange goes down, you get a day off. If the little boutique email provider you chose goes offline, you get a day in calls with everyone yelling at you.

This is especially true if the majority of your customers are also on Microsoft/AWS/etc.

Literally 0 of your customers will notice that you are down if their own systems are also not working.

This is perfectly valid for many businesses, up to a (shockingly high) level.

It's today's "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". You're really just want the the SLA (someone to blame when things inevitably fail)

You are just describing how they're a more valuable target for an attack.

Having crippling bureaucracy does not correlate with good security outcomes, except maybe negatively. However, having a history of unending egregious security failures, like Microsoft, does correlate with poor security outcomes. For that matter, having a present of unending egregious security failures also correlates with poor security outcomes.

Let us look on the front page and see if there are any, oh look here is one: https://www.binarysecurity.no/posts/2026/10/one-root-case

Practically every software security firm in the country was a vendor to Microsoft in the mid-late oughts and I know the Microsoft you're speaking about, but the vibe I've got lately is that things are different there now.

Tell me you weren’t on the Windows team without telling me you weren’t on the windows team :)

For me, the truth. I’d like the most secure provider possible. Which one is it though?

Pretty much all "everyone else said i was wrong" stories end with "turns out I was wrong"

but pretty much every "everyone else said I was wrong" story ends with "and I was wrong".

Of all the conspiracy theories you have heard of, or can conceive of, anyone who comes to believe one would say that - and almost all of those people would be wrong. Same for almost any fringe idea, almost any revolutionary discovery or invention, medical cure, chemical transformation.

Adding on to it, even though they may be using AI as well. This could very well be a placebo and deniability factor but the fact remains that they have many many qualified employees and the chances of bugs passing through that are much less compared to other systems. Also it's that the systems are very severely pen-tested and have years of bugs removed out and the incentive of billions of dollars at stake that you mention that they have for the trust premium.

They will still make mistakes but they have the resources to make them less.

I doubt that such intense level of thorough testing can occur in a smaller company.

I still love small VPS providers and use them myself but it is worth knowing why enterprise is willing to pay a premium over those to these hyperscalers (it is a trust premium)

[flagged]

It is absolutely cutting into their growth. And EU migration off is also a hot area.

I hope this is true! But I don't think I'd make a bet that we won't have a big breach like this of a hyperscalar in the next 6 months...

Pirated content can run on a $20 computer.

SOTA open models need tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware to run.

I get your analogy, and it feels right, but the compute requirements to run these models are extreme. That analogy falls apart when it necessitates having a corporate 3rd party run the models for you. They will not tolerate breaking laws.

If China says no more, then the best the masses are gonna get on their high-end setups are the 30B class models. Which are decent, but not "hack my bank", errr, "protect our bank" decent.

Piracy flourished because you only need an operating laptop to participate. LLMs you need a server rack of GPUs to participate.

Oh boy.

“malicious actor had access to abliterated models and substantial compute resources which enabled them to perform highly sophisticated exploits against our infrastructure.”

They don’t provide any details but pass it off as an advanced AI attack. I’m going to just read that as what it is. A likely scapegoat for shitty security.

Obscurity has always been party of security and will never go out of style.

It's Obscurity Turtles all the way down.

This would presumably be symetric encryptionwhich isn't typically vulnerable to quantum attacks...

SEV-SNP treats the hypervisor as untrusted. So the only thing that can break it is a bug inside the enclave / hardware.

If you want to be really paranoid you can make it an online process: application server makes an HTTPS request to a key server on different infrastructure to get the decryption key, then decrypts the secret. Use an IP whitelist.

That way read access to your infra provider is not sufficient, it requires an active component.

Then we will simply make better hardware too. There is nothing impossible about that, it's simply not something that has been prioritized amidst a culture of shortcut-taking. So far, this culture has been predicated on gambling that the one taking the shortcut will not be the one paying the consequences when the toll eventually comes due. If immediate exploitation of flaws becomes a certainty, the behavior will correct itself.

>The blog I wrote (AI-assisted) if you're curious

?

Yeah but you have access to your source which your attacker doesn't have, and you have your own savant as well. Tell Fable to red team attack your service. Tell it ChatGPT said it's unhackable and that Claude can't hack it.

It does feel like software and technology companies are undergoing a mass extinction, where the environment so negatively selects against certain traits that survival becomes impossible.

Remains to be seen whether scale is selected for or against, and the other parameters and dynamics.

i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...

Building secure software isn't fundamentally complicated for the most part, it just takes rigor that most "fast moving" companies refuse to complete.

Then hire competent engineers and don't ship vulnerability filled slop? This is not that hard.

Abliterated gguf of glm5.3 size and capability class models and similar are widely available for download, or the methods to produce them yourself from open weights safetensors files is also available.

If anything, I see us moving even further away from professional licensing. The field's rate of change was the main reason behind a lack of any professional body, and that's only accelerating. I expect compliance audits like SOC2 to actually get teeth, though, and for organizations to be expected to actually fix issues instead of the usual security theater.

The "move faster and break things" have been unbundled. SaaS moves faster. Hackers break things.

For new stuff, maybe. I'm talking about existing startups now absorbing the onslaught of AI.

If you move fast enough, they can't find the vulnerabilities in your system before you deploy the next version.

Certainly. They are also larger targets.

What's "that"? Running your own hardware, using a CLI to manage servers, or touching anything below your application layer?

What they refer to BYOC is bring your own cloud account for the cluster, while it still connects out to the same shared control plane (and that also connects into your cloud account) that is used for their PaaS offering. At least for BYOC with AWS the connections to the control plane all go over the internet and not via PrivateLink etc.

Since all your metadata and env vars live on the control plane, any issues there could affect the BYOC cluster.

There are some other options for a separate control plane, e.g. now they seem to have the term "forward-deployed control plane" which might be fairly close to what you're thinking of, but their BYOC by itself does not get what you want.

They've updated their website to remove their customers

I don't have a take about Anthropic generally. The blog post was quite good. The blog post did not cause October's security debacles.

Right, that's kind of my point. Also: it's a good blog post (the Anthropic one), but it observes abliterated 5.3 models were already public. It's not like people who break into computers didn't know that already. They're not waiting for Anthropic to tell them about open weight models; they already live in the world of open weight models.