> The leak occurred when four Fields Medal laureate lecture fields, marked "HIDDEN," were discovered in the front-end code of the ICM 2026 official schedule.
So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.
I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links.
Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects.
I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.
The tin hat guess. Did you include Google analytics embedded in the pages? Do you navigate to pages and Google analytics sends that data home? 10 years ago I discovered that Google analytics would send the equivalent amount as organic users; meaning if we sent an email newsletter with links to articles, Google would send almost 1:1 ratio the same number of people from search results.
Do you use a CMS or other tools that auto generate sitemap.xml? Perhaps you unknowingly told Google about those sub-pages.
I've also seen Google indexing pages with random values in the path that don't get linked to statically (server asks for the URL then redirects to it immediately). I'm pretty sure they index straight out of the Chrome address bar.
Yep. I remember a similar story as GP described from a friend back in 2008. The site he was working on that wasn't linked to yet was suddenly indexed after he checked out what it looked like in the fancy new "Chrome" browser that Google had just released, causing some moderate panic on his end.
It’s absolutely true. It is a documented fact. It was discovered and entered into public record during the DOJ antitrust investigation into Google Chrome.
They call the signal „popularity“ and it is a successor of the Google Toolbar signal.
This is why Chrome begs you to login constantly and will do it automatically when you login to Gmail through Chrome. Everything you do in the browser (bookmarks, settings, address bar) is data about you sent to Adsense. No need for cookies when you control the browser and know who is using it.
Edit: also private browsing isn’t exactly private when you’re logged in to the browser.
The tools in gmail in some sense "read" all your mail in order to classify spam and do things like calendar integration. The extent to which they do other things with the information is .. unclear.
Why don’t they also capture information you enter into forms on Chrome?
They control the entire browser surface, technically they can know everything, even TLS and E2E encrypted data, that they silently phone home…
If you think this is silly, consider that Microsoft Recall had been observing everything on people’s entire SCREENS and phoning home much of it. That is how a guy was caught recently: https://x.com/t3chfalcon/status/2074134314145489195
Google Chrome used to report visited pages back to Google, not sure if this still the case. Also, Google Analytics can see visited pages and Google uses it.
Finding domains is easy, everybody uses CTL to find them.
There's a couple avenues besides just stealing what's in your URL bar.
If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs.
Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.
CT logs just explain how they found the domain. T doesn't explain how they could have found unlinked content on the domain itself. If I put up secret-example.com/asdf-1234567.html, how does that page get found if there are no public links to it?
They log all DNS requests made to their public resolver in a searchable internal database, at least when I worked there a decade or so ago. I wonder if they seed their crawler with it?
DNS servers never see subpaths you request, only the domain itself, so that wouldn’t help with a hidden path. But there are lots of other ways to get it: caches/CDNs can leak paths, Chrome presumably sends Google a bunch of request details, and so on.
It’s a different story if it’s a subdomain though, OP wasn’t clear.
Nothing you enter into an LLM not hosted by you, or put onto the web is safe from being collected and exploited by these "AI" companies and their LLM's voracious appetite.
Isn't leaking browser extension used by one of people on the team (doesn't need to be developer, could be qa or anybody with whom the access was shared) more plausible?
Well, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up.
Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
The fact that an egregious case happened once, decades ago, is probably not sufficient grounding to act like every bit of equally trivial “hacking” always results in massively disproportionate law enforcement response.
Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
>But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
Eh, it's typical enough that most cyber security researchers are cautious. The laws around 'hacking' can be rather stupidly written while judges and juries aren't the smartest bunch.
Yeah that happens all the time. Anyone/thing with popular public releases has fans/journeys scraping the website looking for unreleased material or scoops.
In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
Most of what an LLM does "could have" been done by a human if you throw enough human hours at it. But the reality in this circumstance is that a new tool helped find this leak. Saying this could have happened in a "non LLM world" is analogous to "someone else could have discovered special relativity, let's not mention Einstein"
This is like when a news site throws up a paywall and hides half the article. Open inspector. Select the body, delete the overflow/scroll capture styles, delete the masks... and boom there is the entire article. Only some sites are smart enough to actually truncate the content server-side.
So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.
Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects.
I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.
Do you use a CMS or other tools that auto generate sitemap.xml? Perhaps you unknowingly told Google about those sub-pages.
They call the signal „popularity“ and it is a successor of the Google Toolbar signal.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
Edit: also private browsing isn’t exactly private when you’re logged in to the browser.
And maybe have access to EVERY site actually, with “forgot password” type stuff in addition to providing oauth tokens…
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/micro...
Boy do I have news for you.
Especially if you have autocomplete-while-searching type of features on.
They control the entire browser surface, technically they can know everything, even TLS and E2E encrypted data, that they silently phone home…
If you think this is silly, consider that Microsoft Recall had been observing everything on people’s entire SCREENS and phoning home much of it. That is how a guy was caught recently: https://x.com/t3chfalcon/status/2074134314145489195
And it is actually much worse than even that:
https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
For some reason people are downvoting you, but yea, one day we'll likely see a lawsuit where they do exactly that.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/advanced-configurati...
Finding domains is easy, everybody uses CTL to find them.
If you don't use wildcard certs all of your subdomains can be scraped from the certificate transparency logs. Additionally, any domain+cert using HSTS with preload enabled end up in a big list at Google to speed up the initial connection from browser to site.
But I think the other explanations take care of pages: cloudflare hints, chrome reporting addresses visited, etc.
It’s a different story if it’s a subdomain though, OP wasn’t clear.
Also that browser setting to check urls are safe sends them out “sometimes“.
This is on the devs and feels like a very basic leak which could have exploited in the non LLM world as well.
Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.
Sucks it happened. But we all know that is not the typical scenario.
Eh, it's typical enough that most cyber security researchers are cautious. The laws around 'hacking' can be rather stupidly written while judges and juries aren't the smartest bunch.
In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902814
See also
Zhihu (Chinese Reddit): https://www.zhihu.com/question/2060133066643879544/answer/20...
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1urv4id/comment/oxak6...
Second, fitting that codex enters the picture.
The last time the fields medals were announced llms were still very nascent :)
And I am convinced this is the last time pure human fields medalists will be announced.
The next batch’s winners are all going to have llms as coauthors.
Interestingly, if true, it will also be the first time an MIT PhD graduate has won the Fields Medal.
Some Indian restaurants near me sell Aloo Saag, others sell Alu Sag.
Esp. in this case with Wang having a special meaning in China.
Such as waste of energy to argue on
Amusing to see someone complaining about not using their definition of "proper language" when they themselves are not using proper language.