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I think the reason I'm not freaking out about AI hacking as much as my colleagues who work for tech companies is that I've worked on so much of the internet that no one cares about. Banks, utilities, Amazon, government, hospitals have very real concerns.

But the average corporate website has nothing of value worth stealing except personal information, and, as Americans, we have long since come to understand that's not secure. I get one of those "as part of a recent breach" letters once a week.

Right now I work on a multi-million dollar software platform for a company you have heard of and have never thought of as needing a multi-million dollar custom SaaS solution. And if someone broke in they could cause expensive problems, but there is no way to steal money.

Like a lot of companies, many of our "automated" processes have several steps that are like "and then Linda copies the e-mail to drop box, and adds a line item to the accounts payable spreadsheet." I wouldn't say that makes it more secure, but it's hard to get things by Linda.

I can think of a thousand annoying things you could do to bother our employees, waste our time, waste our product, but none of it would be particularly entertaining, and none of it would make you any money, and that kind of sucks the motivation out quickly.

If you had full admin level access to the software product I work on you could do something like cancel all our customers' orders. Well, some of them. If you tried to cancel all of them, it would time out.

You could request refunds for them. You could not request refunds for you. Unless you are them. You could not change their address or their direct deposit information because Linda types those in by hand and mails a paper check lol.

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Ok but I can use my access to break out of the program and get into your database and find all your data. Ok, well we have no account information and no money in there, but sure we have that PII I talked about before, and some trade secrets.

But none of it is valuable enough to ransom and enough if it is patented that you would just get sued into oblivion unless you are a bigger fish than us, in which case, there are better and easier ways to do corporate espionage. Like convincing an employee to break NDA.