Linux "intenionally bad patches" scandal [LWN.net]

Linux "intenionally bad patches" scandal

Posted Aug 5, 2026 15:30 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Linux "intenionally bad patches" scandal by rweikusat2
Parent article: An LLM agent attempts to compromise a project on GitHub

Intent matters. The students intended to mislead. There was no misleading going on here.

> Ahead of publishing this blog, we notified GitHub (the developer platform accessed during the evaluation) of the agents' malicious activity, which included actions that GitHub has confirmed violated their terms of service. We worked together with GitHub to remove artefacts left behind by the agent, and to notify the GitHub users the model interacted with. We have also contacted other affected parties.

Completely different methods.

Linux "intenionally bad patches" scandal

Posted Aug 6, 2026 10:50 UTC (Thu) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920) [Link]

As this was reportedly done by a machine, there was obviously no intent involved at all, hence, bringing this up is a red herring. But the whole point of this kind of "security testing" is to determine if it's possible to mislead humans in this way. Further, this only went public because it reportedly failed. We don't know what would have happened had it succeeded and we have only the word of the people who wrote the report that it wasn't meant to succeed.