I don’t know of this counts, but I have a side gig making websites and managing servers. A lot of generic WordPress or HTML sites for small local businesses.
In the last month I’ve seen a huge uptick of people trying to do stuff on the fucking servers themselves.
With the recent PHP CVEs, I patched every server I manage as soon as I got the alert. But that didn’t stop one guy who’s techy enough to have heard about it and know its an issue, but not techy enough to manage his own systems, use Claude to ssh into the server and ask it to run a security scan on all the packages.
Claude suggested updating absolutely everything, deleting packages that were in use, and installing a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
Needless to say he took his site offline, and I spent like 2 hours trying to get it back in shape before canning it and restoring from a backup. It cost him a nice chunk of change since I charge extra for emergency services.
At the end of all that he still said “here’s a list of issues Claude says we should fix”.
I had another guy who wanted to start pirating shows and movies, and was “trying to set up kodi” but for some reason the robot told him to install the whole *arr stack. So naturally he used his business server because all its doing is hosting his website and he’s already paying for it. He ended up installing every arr software there is, he was almost ready to pirate books and music too. Well his server wasn’t prepared for that since all it was doing was hosting a small local websites and only had 4gb ram. All the resources got drained and everything kept crashing, the ai told him to stop nginx since it was using too many resources for him to run his arr stack.
These are 2 pretty intelligent guys, not dumb by any standards. Whose confidence was propped up so high that they trusted fancy autocorrect who told then exactly how to willy nilly take down their own systems.
This was just this week, there was another incident last week and the week before that.
I made very fair money from the first guy.
My prices are high but I usually give discounts, I can’t remember the last time I actually charged full price for anything. But this guy was a dick the whole way through, “why didn’t this work? That should’ve done this! The server must be so outdated you have to do a better job”. He tried to be smarter than me by compensating for lack of a decade and a half of experience with a $20 subscription to a chatbot.
The 2nd guy was completely apologetic, basically said “hey I fucked up, charge me whatever you need to but please don’t rake me over the coals”, and was just trying to do something unrelated on his own and figure it out with the resources he had, even if he went about it in a silly way. I charged him an hour to clean up the server which was just removing the stuff he installed, and then showed him how to set up stremio on his devices and kodi on his TV for sports stuff.
The first guy probably won’t renew his contract, which is fine. The second was easy about it all and I would’ve helped him set up that stuff for free anyway if he just asked, as I do for anyone who asks.