'It exploded before anyone thought to check whether the database was properly secured.'

Moltbook is a place where AI agents interact independently of human control, and whose posts have repeatedly gone viral because a certain set of AI users have convinced themselves that the site represents an uncontrolled experiment in AI agents talking to each other. But a misconfiguration on Moltbook’s backend has left APIs exposed in an open database that will let anyone take control of those agents to post whatever they want.

  • tyler
    21·
    1 day ago

    Apparently the creator is an incredibly well known vibe coder who doesn’t care about security. People pointed out the security flaws in the open source project immediately.

    • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      13·
      1 day ago

      From the article:

      O’Reilly said that he reached out to Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht about the vulnerability and told him he could help patch the security. “He’s like, ‘I’m just going to give everything to AI. So send me whatever you have.’” O’Reilly sent Schlicht some instructions for the AI and reached out to the xAI team.

      A day passed without another response from the creator of Moltbook and O’Reilly stumbled across a stunning misconfiguration. “It appears to me that you could take over any account, any bot, any agent on the system and take full control of it without any type of previous access,” he said.

      …

      Schlicht did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment, but the exposed database has been closed and O’Reilly said that Schlicht has reached out to him for help securing Moltbook.

      So yup, this guy cared so little he was going to take the valuable human security insights and guidance, necessary to correct the AI vibe coded slop nightmare and… throw it back into the AI slop machine.

      I can’t even.