I don’t know of this counts, but I have a side gig making websites and managing servers. A lot of generic WordPress or HTML sites for small local businesses.
In the last month I’ve seen a huge uptick of people trying to do stuff on the fucking servers themselves.
With the recent PHP CVEs, I patched every server I manage as soon as I got the alert. But that didn’t stop one guy who’s techy enough to have heard about it and know its an issue, but not techy enough to manage his own systems, use Claude to ssh into the server and ask it to run a security scan on all the packages.
Claude suggested updating absolutely everything, deleting packages that were in use, and installing a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
Needless to say he took his site offline, and I spent like 2 hours trying to get it back in shape before canning it and restoring from a backup. It cost him a nice chunk of change since I charge extra for emergency services.
At the end of all that he still said “here’s a list of issues Claude says we should fix”.
I had another guy who wanted to start pirating shows and movies, and was “trying to set up kodi” but for some reason the robot told him to install the whole *arr stack. So naturally he used his business server because all its doing is hosting his website and he’s already paying for it. He ended up installing every arr software there is, he was almost ready to pirate books and music too. Well his server wasn’t prepared for that since all it was doing was hosting a small local websites and only had 4gb ram. All the resources got drained and everything kept crashing, the ai told him to stop nginx since it was using too many resources for him to run his arr stack.
These are 2 pretty intelligent guys, not dumb by any standards. Whose confidence was propped up so high that they trusted fancy autocorrect who told then exactly how to willy nilly take down their own systems.
This was just this week, there was another incident last week and the week before that.
I’ve encountered the same thing in a completely unrelated field.
I’m a tax consultant, a CPA, for nearly 20 years now.
About once a week I get a call from either a client or a prospective client and straight away get the vibe they’ve been talking to a bot. It’s tough to explain but I shouldn’t have to waste my time responding to a bot’s assertions before getting to the actual problem at hand.
We try to be pretty cool with charging for our time, because starting an enquiry with an explanation of a 5 minute billing structure sets the wrong tone, and I prefer to just name a price for solving an actual problem.
However, with these calls instead of a client telling me a problem and me explaining the solution, the client proposes several solutions they need help with and I have to undo all of that before I can understand the problem. The tail kinda wags the dog.
For example, one guy emailed me explaining that he wanted a new business structure. The email was slop but ok - we charge heaps for this type of job so I can put up with it. However, after an hour long discussion I had convinced him that he was much better off without the structure. Only an hour of my time, (but still a waste) and a misadventure for him, that could have cost him $5k.
Another guy was on the phone, rattling off a series of questions a bot had given him to evaluate a consultant. One of them was “what can you do to help me grow my business”. He was 20 years old and had 7 clients for whom he mowed their lawns.
I’m still trying to figure out the best policy for these situations. I think for the time being, my plan is to interrupt as soon as I get that bot-vibe, and say that it sounds a bit like they’ve been researching this with a bot, and that I need to start from the start just to make sure nothing is overlooked. Perhaps I’ll add as an aside that correcting the problems caused by advice from bots is very time consuming and costly.
I don’t know of this counts, but I have a side gig making websites and managing servers. A lot of generic WordPress or HTML sites for small local businesses.
In the last month I’ve seen a huge uptick of people trying to do stuff on the fucking servers themselves.
With the recent PHP CVEs, I patched every server I manage as soon as I got the alert. But that didn’t stop one guy who’s techy enough to have heard about it and know its an issue, but not techy enough to manage his own systems, use Claude to ssh into the server and ask it to run a security scan on all the packages.
Claude suggested updating absolutely everything, deleting packages that were in use, and installing a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
Needless to say he took his site offline, and I spent like 2 hours trying to get it back in shape before canning it and restoring from a backup. It cost him a nice chunk of change since I charge extra for emergency services.
At the end of all that he still said “here’s a list of issues Claude says we should fix”.
I had another guy who wanted to start pirating shows and movies, and was “trying to set up kodi” but for some reason the robot told him to install the whole *arr stack. So naturally he used his business server because all its doing is hosting his website and he’s already paying for it. He ended up installing every arr software there is, he was almost ready to pirate books and music too. Well his server wasn’t prepared for that since all it was doing was hosting a small local websites and only had 4gb ram. All the resources got drained and everything kept crashing, the ai told him to stop nginx since it was using too many resources for him to run his arr stack.
These are 2 pretty intelligent guys, not dumb by any standards. Whose confidence was propped up so high that they trusted fancy autocorrect who told then exactly how to willy nilly take down their own systems.
This was just this week, there was another incident last week and the week before that.
I’ve encountered the same thing in a completely unrelated field.
I’m a tax consultant, a CPA, for nearly 20 years now.
About once a week I get a call from either a client or a prospective client and straight away get the vibe they’ve been talking to a bot. It’s tough to explain but I shouldn’t have to waste my time responding to a bot’s assertions before getting to the actual problem at hand.
We try to be pretty cool with charging for our time, because starting an enquiry with an explanation of a 5 minute billing structure sets the wrong tone, and I prefer to just name a price for solving an actual problem.
However, with these calls instead of a client telling me a problem and me explaining the solution, the client proposes several solutions they need help with and I have to undo all of that before I can understand the problem. The tail kinda wags the dog.
For example, one guy emailed me explaining that he wanted a new business structure. The email was slop but ok - we charge heaps for this type of job so I can put up with it. However, after an hour long discussion I had convinced him that he was much better off without the structure. Only an hour of my time, (but still a waste) and a misadventure for him, that could have cost him $5k.
Another guy was on the phone, rattling off a series of questions a bot had given him to evaluate a consultant. One of them was “what can you do to help me grow my business”. He was 20 years old and had 7 clients for whom he mowed their lawns.
I’m still trying to figure out the best policy for these situations. I think for the time being, my plan is to interrupt as soon as I get that bot-vibe, and say that it sounds a bit like they’ve been researching this with a bot, and that I need to start from the start just to make sure nothing is overlooked. Perhaps I’ll add as an aside that correcting the problems caused by advice from bots is very time consuming and costly.
That is pure, undistilled awesome. We’re approaching “delete system32” kinda awesome.