Transcription
The most terrifying article I've ever read about AI is available on LinkedIn, and it's not about drone swarms or autonomous weapons or killer robots. It's about code that was written in 1986. Let me explain here.
Mark Rasanovich, who's a CTO for Microsoft Azure, took an article from Compute magazine from 1986 on better branching in Applesoft. And Applesoft is kind of like the Apple version of the BASIC programming language. He fed this into Claude code, which is an AI-powered uh agent designed for terminal-based software development. And Claude not only understood the intent of the program and found a bug in the code. Not a horrible bug, but incorrect behavior. And if you want to read the whole PDF on Mark's discovery, that's available at ryb.substack.com. That's is Mark's property. I'm just promoting it. And I'll also uh give you a link to his LinkedIn article.
So why is this terrifying? Well, Claude was able to read and understand a binary from 40 years ago, discover the programmer's intent, and even find a bug. And this is important because over 70% of Fortune 500 companies run legacy systems written in an old programming language called COBOL. And many of these systems were written back when computer security wasn't really a thing. Like, computer security was the fact that very few people knew how to program. And as the language got older and the programmers who coded these programs retired or even died, systems kind of became more secure because fewer and fewer people knew the programming language. Although it was more was security by obscurity. Uh, in fact, during the pandemic of 2020, COBOL programmers were in demand again because many state unemployment systems were written in COBOL, and none of my generation of programmers or the current generation of programmers knew what they were looking at. Um, but I I guarantee you, in those systems, in those old COBOL systems, the vulnerabilities are there. Um, security by obscurity is great. Uh, but it's basically an unlocked door that's hidden, right? If nobody knows where that door is, they're not going to be able to open it because they can't find it. But if they do find it, it's you're going to be able to open it. And what we just saw is that Claude AI essentially can discover the door.
Now, secrets that were previously safe because nobody knew the language or knew about the secret can get revealed in minutes or maybe in an afternoon of AI compute time. And this is why this is probably the biggest threat s to cybersecurity since the Y2K bug. You know, back when programmers scrambled to make sure two-digit dates are actually four-digit dates at the start of the new millennium. And that would probably be a good video on its own. But this means that everything built essentially in the past 50 years that's still running can be reverse engineered and scanned for exploits. This means industrial controls. This means uh hardware devices. This means satellites if you can get the source code. Uh, this means Visual Basic programs that were written 30 years ago and still run your back office. That's that's exploitable right now. And every single one of these things can be disassembled and scanned by Claude code. And the scary thing is that it's not just the state actors you have to worry about. If there's a guy in your organization who's mad at the company because he didn't get a promotion and he knows a little bit about programming and can use Claude code, he can scan these systems and look for vulnerabilities and just wreak havoc on your business. Um, hackers. I mean, my god, I I can only imagine the amount of industrial controls that are condu uh connected to the internet that were written 20 years ago that are unsafe, and we have people going through that stuff right now. Um, this is going to be a problem.
And the good news is that you can use Claude to scan your systems now and maybe come up with fixes. However, not every company is going to do this. Not every company is going to know how to do this, and it's going to be a problem because the clock just started ticking on every single legacy system running in the modern world. Uh, you can read Mark Rousanovich's article at ryanbth.substack.com. Also have a link to his original LinkedIn post. Thank you guys for watching.
Hey everyone, new Ryan McBTH t-shirts and hoodies from Bunker Branding are available. I'm gonna get the Himar shirt. What are you gonna get, Donald? The Patriot shirt because I'm a Patriot. It's the best shirt. The biggest shirt. Make 14 Tango great again. What are you going to get, Barack? Let me be clear. I'm going to get a drone sweet drone shirt. What about you, George? >> I'm going to get a try that missile shirt cuz they're weapons of mass destruction. >> I'm going to get a land by marker shirt because my presidency always blew up in my face. I'll tell you what I'm going to get. Ronald Reagan, but you're dead. I came back to tell you that no matter our politics, we're all Americans, and we should buy Ryan's hoodies and t-shirts because they pay for the stock footage and licenses that allow him to make awesome content. So come on down to Bunker Branding and buy a Ryan McBTH t-shirt, or I'll start the bombing in 5 minutes.