Security through obscurity is dead. I used to let my straggly collection of home servers and rented VPSs chug along with outdated firmware and security settings I only loosely understood, comfortable in the knowledge that:
1) Nobody cared about my servers
2) They weren't connected to anything important
But because of AI, (1) is no longer true. And if you believe Anthropic's murmurings about self-replicating LLMs, (2) may not be relevant either. I have had to pre-emptively get a frontier LLM to systematically fix and harden all of my hobby instances. On the bright side - also because of LLMs - it was very easy. There is really no excuse for outdated security anymore, when an LLM can one-shot harden almost any service.
But because of AI, (1) is no longer true. And if you believe Anthropic's murmurings about self-replicating LLMs, (2) may not be relevant either. I have had to pre-emptively get a frontier LLM to systematically fix and harden all of my hobby instances. On the bright side - also because of LLMs - it was very easy. There is really no excuse for outdated security anymore, when an LLM can one-shot harden almost any service.