Chapter 1: What is LessWrong's current security posture?
Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked. By Robert M. Published on April 8, 2026. Or, for that matter, anything else.
This post is meant to be two things. 1. A PSA about LessWrong's current security posture from a LessWrong admin. 2. An attempt to establish common knowledge of the security situation it looks like the world, and, by extension, you will shortly be in. Claude Mythos was announced yesterday.
That announcement came with a blog post from Anthropic's Frontier Red team, detailing the large number of zero days and other security vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos.
This should not be a surprise if you were paying attention, LLMs, being trained on coding first was a big hint, the labs putting cybersecurity as a top-level item in their threat models and evals was another, and frankly this blog post maybe could have been written a couple months ago, either this or this might have been sufficient. But it seems quite overdetermined now.
Heading Less wrong security posture In the past, I have tried to communicate that Lesrong should not be treated as a platform with a hardened security posture. Lesrong is run by a small team. Our operational philosophy is similar to that of many early-stage startups.
We treat some less wrong data as private in a social sense, but do not consider ourselves to be in the business of securely storing sensitive information. We make many choices and trade-offs in the direction that marginally favor speed over security, which many large organizations would make differently. I think this is reasonable and roughly endorse the kinds of trade-offs we're making.
I think it is important for you to understand the above when making decisions about how to use LessWrong. Please do not store highly sensitive information in LessWrong drafts or send it to other users via LessWrong messages with the expectation that LessWrong will be robust to the maybe upcoming wave of scaled cyber attacks. LessWrong is not a high-value target.
While LessWrong may end up in the affected blast radius simply due to its nature as an online platform, we do not store the kind of user data that cybercriminals in the business of conducting scaled cyberattacks are after.
The most likely outcome of a data breach is that the database is scanned via automated tooling for anything that looks like account credentials, crypto wallet keys, LLM inference provider API keys, or similar. If you have ever stored anything like that in a draft post or sent it to another user via LessWrongDM, I recommend cycling it immediately.
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Chapter 2: How does the announcement of Claude Mythos impact cybersecurity?
From what I could find, probably well under half of data breaches result in datasets that get publicly circulated in any meaningful sense. Many of those that do are for sale, not freely available.
Someone with a chip on their shoulder might download a freely available dataset, but is much less likely to spend money on it and also risk the eye of the state if they then try to use that purchased data for anything untoward. Datasets like this often don't ever really go away, but they often do become unavailable, especially if they're large.
Storage is expensive, hosting sites generally take them down on request, torrenting is risky, and there isn't much motive to keep re-uploading terabytes of data that you aren't even selling. Monetizable datasets tend to be stripped down and much smaller, but also wouldn't include approximately any of the information that you might be concerned about here. Subheading. FAQ.
There are three details boxes here, which are omitted from this narration. The three boxes have the titles what private data of mine could be exposed in a breach, can I delete my data, and is less wrong planning on changing anything. Heading. The broader situation. Epistemic status. I am not a security professional.
I am a software engineer who has spent more time thinking about security than the median software engineer, but maybe not the 99th percentile. This section necessarily requires some extrapolation into the uncertain future.
A proper treatment of what's about to happen really deserves its own post, ideally by a subject matter expert, or at least someone who's spent quite a bit more time on thinking about this question than I have.
I nonetheless include some very quick thoughts below, mostly relevant to US-based individuals that don't have access to highly sensitive corporate secrets or classified government information. Many existing threat models don't seem obviously affected by the first-order impacts of a dramatic increase in scalable cyber-offensive capabilities.
For threat models which seem likely to get worse are third-party data breaches, software supply chain attacks, ransomware, and cryptocurrency theft. I'm not sure what to do about data breaches, in general. The typical vector of exploitation is often various forms of fraud involving identity theft or impersonation, but scaled blackmail campaigns wouldn't be terribly shocking as a new problem.
One can also imagine many other problems cropping up downstream of LLMs providing scalable cognition, enabling many avenues of value extraction that were previously uneconomical due to the sheer volume of data. If you're worried about identity theft, set up a credit freeze. Behave virtuously.
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