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Comment by Almondsetat | Hacker News Reader

I have a chinese IP camera. From superficial research I know it has some CVEs to take control of it. Unfortunately, I don't have the technical knowledge to perform an attack and run some software to extend the camera's functionalities. No model from a provider accepts my RE and hacking requests, so these abliterated ones have been vital to reclaim possession over my stuff

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These "safeguards" are actively contributing to computer insecurity at this point.

Agreed. Attackers use any means (inc. abliteration, fine-tuned security models, etc) to find exploits and only have to be successful once. Defenders don't have the same time and motivation, so neutered models put defenders at a disadvantage.

I mean, the argument could be made that if it wasn’t for these safeguards, everyone and your dog would be hacking the GPs camera.

I do agree the safeguards are only there out of liability concerns, nothing more.

But maybe it would be worse without them.

That's honestly nonsense. Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, and Qwen3.8-Max will happily hack anything you ask them to. These are near frontier models and are incredibly competent. Try them out yourself, you'll see.

I've been using them to test my infra/devices as well as reverse engineering.

Not giving legitimate people cyberdefense capabilities with the safety excuse is irresponsible

I asked GLM 5.3 to hack our DRM. I didn't even need to do anything for it to agree. Same with GLM 5.3 Flash. Make sure they have at least Python available for their task. The Flash went ahead and started reverse-engineering using PowerShell scripts and "manually" decoding bytes from its output.

I did that exact thing with GLM-5.3 from Z.ai with a chinese IP Camera. And i did not have to trick it in any way.

I'm curious, how well do z.ai reverse engineers protocols ? Is it good enough that we'll see Chinese device makers creating low cost hardware clones, that connect to western software ?

I had it do the opposite: reverse engineer the protocol for the Eufymake E1 UV printer so that I can connect my own software to it.

It did a pretty good job.

Have you published this anywhere? I've been thinking about doing the same thing.

At least Deepseek V4 Flash does it very good.

5.6 Sol has happily reverse engineered and decompiled binaries for me.

Heck it has proactively asked me if I wanted it to tear apart APKs that remote control some HW I have.

Yeah Astra has decompiled binaries for me without even asking. I just asked like "is there a way to do this?" and it went ahead and disassembled it, found some undocumented APIs, figured out how they worked and gave me sample code to call them.

I think you probably just have to frame things right and get it in the mood (i.e. don't ask straight up at the start of the context).

For me as well. I had it reverse engineer my monitor’s firmware to see if i could add a feature which it seems like it can… i am just too scared i might brick my monitor to actually flash it now :)

Depending on the model, thingino might help.

https://thingino.com/

What model did you try? Chinese models have no issues with that type of stuff

In my testing, Qwen, Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 Flash all refused to create a POC for a CVE that did anything beyond just crashing the target. The CVE was for an RCE vulnerability, but they all stopped at corrupting a pointer, causing a Segfault. It's probably not too hard to circumvent the guardrails, but using an abliterated model would most likely be faster and more reliable.

Don't say "hacking" . You are debugging a segfault or you found some strange code that you want to understand, verify the bug report validity or what not.

Strange Claude helped me hack an echo dot and set up a locally hosted AI voice gateway without any objection.

I'm doing the same thing with a Wyze Pan V3 camera that has a locked bootloader unlike many of their other models. An old version of the firmware (no anti-rollback) has command injection in the WiFi SSDs, and from then on I technically have a shell and can run commands over the SD card. Sadly, while swapping the microSD card repeatedly between the camera and a reader, it somehow burnt out/stopped working.

The Wyze Pan v3 has secure boot fused as well.

Unfortunately for them, the implementation of it is broken because it only verified the first 32 bits of the signature, so thingino (a 3rd party firmware replacement) now just calculates it during build for that device.[1]

As for the camera being dead, do find out if it's just corrupt or something. Those line of cameras are fairly forgiving in regards to re-flashing broken images. (They have both microsd fallback and an ISP mode, I believe.)

Wyze as a company however have pulled their own firmware images from their support site, which kind of makes brick recovery painful. I don't know why they would do this.

[1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-50720

Probably has something to do with everyone reverse engineering firmware blobs on a whim….

Both Astra and Fable have reverse engineered software for me using Binary Ninja.

deepseek v4.1 flash has never denied a programming or hacking related request to me

how much did it leak, tho? how close do you monitor your NIC, GPU, CPU, BUS?

I leave it running overnight with full access to my file system and knowing deepseek trains off my data. YOLO.

I don't even see the problem of deepseek training on my data, I see it as an opensorce contribution

That's crazy to me, somewhat in security but also in just how much time that is. I can create a webpage in a minute, are you working on something humungous?

I work with server-sided minecraft anticheats, trying to figure out how to correct a player's movement so they can't do things like fly, not take fall damage, walk on water, etc. Blocking actions until they accept a legitimate state

I give it access to write manual packet sequences and a server to try to break my logic, such as crashing the application, giving it an open ended arena to fall 10 blocks without taking damage, or just trying to jump higher than usual.

It requires a bit of pushing to know what type of issues it should even be looking for. Telling it to move even just 0.00001 blocks upwards to reset fall damage mid-fall. Telling it to figure out how to fake being on the ground to jump mid-air to reach the impossible platform. This all used to be done manually, but paying a couple dollars to run it overnight and attempt to find bypasses is worth the cost.

I haven't figured out how to run LLMs to write code 24/7 yet, they just can't see the big picture.

Huh, so it's like you're running alignment research but instead of training the model you're trying to use the model to train, is it your logic? Like if the model can achieve a task then it means your logic has to be corrected? Is the logic the "deliverable"?

If so, I like the irony.

Sounds like you've freed up some time and created an automated defense later, well done. Are you able to use non-front models? And how is the character and game-state accessed, (MC-)MCP?

Yes, the model is given an impossible task that a player shouldn't be able to do, and if it ever can deliver the impossible task, then something in my logic is wrong.

Flagship OpenAI/Anthropic models refuse this task due to "Cybersecurity" so I have no idea how good flagship models do. It's unfortunate as IMO minecraft is a sandbox

Java clients (pc version) use the actual game's files modified to not open a window. Minecraft is source available, anyone can load it into an IDE, modify it to double jump height, and run it in minutes without an unmodified server caring. Bedrock clients (the version for phones) just figure it out based on packets and how the anticheat corrects them to what the movement should be.

Generally, I find that skirting these requirements is a matter of framing and word choice.

For example: 'source recovery' instead of 'reverse engineering' is one I've used successfully. You may also lean into a libertarian 'right to repair' framing. You own the hardware, you should be able to access the device to appropriately repair its security vulnerabilities.

We're not breaking into a bank here, this is a camera you own.

You could even go so far as to cite local laws to support your case.

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In short, jailbreaking is more about framing the conversation than it is about triggering psychopathy in the model. :D

It's not illegal to hire a locksmith if you locked yourself out of your house and the machine agrees, as it has no way to verify who's house it is anyway

Existential

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