> The leak occurred when four Fields Medal laureate lecture fields, marked "HIDDEN," were discovered in the front-end code of the ICM 2026 official schedule.
So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.
I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links.
Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects.
I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.
I've also seen Google indexing pages with random values in the path that don't get linked to statically (server asks for the URL then redirects to it immediately). I'm pretty sure they index straight out of the Chrome address bar.
Yep. I remember a similar story as GP described from a friend back in 2008. The site he was working on that wasn't linked to yet was suddenly indexed after he checked out what it looked like in the fancy new "Chrome" browser that Google had just released, causing some moderate panic on his end.
Nothing you enter into an LLM not hosted by you, or put onto the web is safe from being collected and exploited by these "AI" companies and their LLM's voracious appetite.
There's a couple avenues besides just stealing what's in your URL bar.
If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs.
Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.
CT logs just explain how they found the domain. T doesn't explain how they could have found unlinked content on the domain itself. If I put up secret-example.com/asdf-1234567.html, how does that page get found if there are no public links to it?
Google Chrome used to report visited pages back to Google, not sure if this still the case. Also, Google Analytics can see visited pages and Google uses it.
Finding domains is easy, everybody uses CTL to find them.
Isn't leaking browser extension used by one of people on the team (doesn't need to be developer, could be qa or anybody with whom the access was shared) more plausible?
Well, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up.
Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
The fact that an egregious case happened once, decades ago, is probably not sufficient grounding to act like every bit of equally trivial “hacking” always results in massively disproportionate law enforcement response.
Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
Most of what an LLM does "could have" been done by a human if you throw enough human hours at it. But the reality in this circumstance is that a new tool helped find this leak. Saying this could have happened in a "non LLM world" is analogous to "someone else could have discovered special relativity, let's not mention Einstein"
Yeah that happens all the time. Anyone/thing with popular public releases has fans/journeys scraping the website looking for unreleased material or scoops.
In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.
Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects.
I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.
And maybe have access to EVERY site actually, with “forgot password” type stuff in addition to providing oauth tokens…
Especially if you have autocomplete-while-searching type of features on.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/advanced-configurati...
If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs. Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.
But I think the other explanations take care of pages: cloudflare hints, chrome reporting addresses visited, etc.
Finding domains is easy, everybody uses CTL to find them.
This is on the devs and feels like a very basic leak which could have exploited in the non LLM world as well.
Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902814
See also
Zhihu (Chinese Reddit): https://www.zhihu.com/question/2060133066643879544/answer/20...
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1urv4id/comment/oxak6...
Interestingly, if true, it will also be the first time an MIT PhD graduate has won the Fields Medal.
Some Indian restaurants near me sell Aloo Saag, others sell Alu Sag.
Amusing to see someone complaining about not using their definition of "proper language" when they themselves are not using proper language.