February 21, 2026
Shhh… the bots are listening
The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter
Hack-bots don’t sleep; community splits: outrun or go dark
TLDR: AI tools now hack and hunt at machine speed, from PentAGI’s one-click tests to Claude uncovering 500+ hidden flaws. Commenters are split between racing to respond faster and hiding everything by default, with standards like OpenNHP floated as the ‘go invisible’ play — because visibility now feels like risk.
Cue the horror‑movie timestamp: 02:13 your server is scanned, 02:16 you’re breached — no human in sight. The community watched PentAGI, an open-source AI “pentester,” rack up thousands of stars and downloads, and saw Anthropic’s Claude find 500+ serious bugs lurking for years in popular projects. Translation for non‑nerds: robots can now find doors humans missed — fast. That set the tone of the thread: windcbf drops the nightmare question everyone’s thinking — if the attack bots scale, can humans keep up?
Then the room split. One camp screams “run faster,” the other yells “turn off the lights.” The go‑dark crowd rallies behind “Zero Visibility” — no public addresses, no open doors to knock on — with SecurityGeekYY pushing the mantra to hide by default. Standards nerds cheer as troymc links an Internet‑draft for OpenNHP, fueling “Dark Mode for the whole internet” memes. Old‑school econ adds a chilling throwback: his Windows 95 box later lit up with 1,500 infections — proof that detection often arrives after the party. Meanwhile, zhubert calls foul on the “Dark Forest” metaphor: this isn’t a god‑tier enemy, it’s everyone renting a super‑genius coder. The jokes flew — “Hide your kids, hide your IPs,” “servers cosplaying as 404” — but the final vibe was dead serious: evolve or vanish.
Key Points
- •PentAGI is an open-source autonomous penetration testing agent that orchestrates 20+ tools, runs up to 16 parallel sub-agents, supports multiple LLM backends, and reports 5,300+ GitHub stars and 10,000+ Docker pulls.
- •Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team used Claude Opus 4.6 to audit open-source codebases, discovering and validating 500+ high-severity vulnerabilities in projects like GhostScript, OpenSC, and CGIF.
- •The article asserts AI now spans the security lifecycle, from reconnaissance and code analysis to exploit generation, enabling machine-speed attacks at low cost.
- •It argues traditional Zero Trust allows pre-authentication scanning and enumeration, leaving systems visible to AI-driven attackers.
- •The piece proposes “Zero Visibility” infrastructure with no exposed IPs, open ports, or DNS discoverability before authentication to remove the attack surface.