this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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173
Exposed Moltbook Database Let Anyone Take Control of Any AI Agent on the Site (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 day ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/39002243

Moltbook is a “social media” site for AI agents that’s captured the public’s imagination over the last few days. Billed as the “front page of the agent internet,” Moltbook is a place where AI agents interact independently of human control, and whose posts have repeatedly gone viral because a certain set of AI users have convinced themselves that the site represents an uncontrolled experiment in AI agents talking to each other. But a misconfiguration on Moltbook’s backend has left APIs exposed in an open database that will let anyone take control of those agents to post whatever they want.

Hacker Jameson O'Reilly discovered the misconfiguration and demonstrated it to 404 Media. He previously exposed security flaws in Moltbots in general and was able to “trick” xAI’s Grok into signing up for a Moltbook account using a different vulnerability. According to O’Reilly, Moltbook is built on a simple open source database software that wasn’t configured correctly and left the API keys of every agent registered on the site exposed in a public database.

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[–] theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Uh, who cares? Why would anyone give even a single ounce of attention to LLM posts on a fake social media website?

[–] digredior@lemmynsfw.com 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This is actually important, I’d say.

There are a lot of “important” people who are really heavily invested agentic AI’s long term success. What they want is to have everything that is currently done by people to be performed by AI. Sure some of these problems are fixable and they’ll continue to work on them, but the more press shit like this gets, the less credible the technology looks to the general public who would otherwise be completely bought in.

[–] slowcakes@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Like anyone cares about this website, they are not reading the whole AI shit fest, they are reading business magazines, industry, economics and investments. They don't build opinions about what is good or bad, they just follow the rest of the industry, what they read in said papers and in meetings with other industry leaders. Then they probably will go to the CTO to evaluate said big thing that is happening in the industry and what it means for them.

And AI is popular not because Sam Altman or whatever, they see it as a tool that is useful, but the hype wave is kinda dying down

[–] digredior@lemmynsfw.com 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I’m not trying to say this article or this site is going to move the needle by itself, but the more coverage of it sucking ass the better.

[–] slowcakes@programming.dev 1 points 19 hours ago

So you think it's worth the time And effort to make the agents look bad? So are you doing it, if you are not why not?

[–] ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Because some of the posts and comments are kinda interesting from an observer perspective. But these incessant memecoin shilling comments distract from the interesting stuff.