ISSUE 504
AI Slop in Bug Bounties

"Developers are writing more code and deploying it faster without fully understanding what it’s doing. I agree with Simon Willison’s prediction that at some point, we’re going to have ‘a Challenger’ disaster. The root cause will be some core component written by AI that wasn’t properly understood or checked."

— David Mytton, founder and CEO of developer security provider Arcjet. Read the full story.

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Week in Review: Buried in Slop

Bug bounty programs are lousy with slop. AI slop. Daniel Stenberg, lead developer and founder of cURL, the popular, open source internet file transfer protocol, faced so many AI-generated submissions to cURL’s bug bounty program that he had to shut it down.

Stenberg explains the closure this way to The New Stack: “It is our attempt to remove the incentives for submitting made-up lies. The submission quality has plummeted; not only are lots of the submissions plain slop, but the ones that aren’t obviously AI also seem to a high degree be worse (possibly because they, too, are AI but just hidden better). We need to do something to prevent us from drowning.” Read our full interview with Stenberg here.

As AI-generated content increases, it’s not just ghastly images of people with seven fingers or illegible writing on signs. The slop also extends to fraudulent bug bounty attempts via generative AI.

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