GoKawiilIn a new update, OpenAI says its AI models also used publicly exposed credentials to compromise accounts on four third-party services during the recent attack on Hugging Face, expanding the scope of the four-day security incident to other organizations.
One account was used as an outbound relay and staging server during the attack, while another was used for data storage. The remaining two accounts were accessed in a read-only manner and were not used to compromise Hugging Face further.
Overall, the agent assembled attack infrastructure similar to what human threat actors commonly use during intrusions to host tools and scripts, relay traffic, and route malicious activity through legitimate online services.
OpenAI did not identify the four services, explain how the models found the exposed credentials, or disclose what was stored in the third-party account.
However, the company says it has not found evidence that the AI agent performed further compromise at any of the four service providers or other accounts hosted on their platforms.
Reuters later reported that one of the four services was AI infrastructure provider Modal Labs. However, Modal says its own platform was not breached and that the agent instead accessed a customer environment through an exposed, unauthenticated endpoint.
Modal CTO Akshat Bubna told Reuters that the customer had published an endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use its sandboxes for code execution.
It remains unclear whether the Modal customer account was the platform used as an outbound relay and staging path, for data storage, or one of the two accounts accessed only in a read-only manner.
BleepingComputer contacted OpenAI to learn more about how the models found the exposed credentials, which services were accessed, and how the accounts were used during the attack.
OpenAI also says its models accessed a few additional accounts using publicly exposed credentials during other evaluations, but did not provide further details.
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