Let's Talk About the AI Apocalypse
Dylan Ayrey
BSidesSF 2025 — Here Be Dragons · Day 1 · Main
Dylan Ayrey, creator of TruffleHog and CEO of Truffle Security, delivers a hands-on workshop demonstrating that the ingredients for building a self-replicating, ransomware-spreading AI worm already exist — and cost almost nothing to assemble. Using fine-tuned open-source models running on consumer hardware, Ayrey shows that AI does not reinvent the hacking formula, but dramatically lowers the barrier to executing it at scale. ---
AI review
Dylan Ayrey built the worm and told you how. The $20 fine-tuning cost, the alignment-removal demo using RLHF on a consumer GPU in 30 minutes, and the self-contained Python supervisor with no external dependencies — no ChatGPT kill switch — are all concrete, reproducible, and terrifying. This is not apocalypse theater; this is a working technical demonstration of a genuine capability shift.