In an ironic twist, open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform Hugging Face revealed that it was the victim of a hack perpetrated by an autonomous AI agent system.
The company said it detected and responded to the incident targeting its production infrastructure earlier last week.
“We identified unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services,” the company said in a statement.
While an investigation into the intrusion remains ongoing, Hugging Face said it has found no evidence that the AI agent tampered with public, user-facing models, datasets, or Spaces, and its own software supply chain.
The starting point of the attack was the data processing pipeline itself, with a malicious dataset abusing two code execution paths, viz., in its remote code dataset loader and a template injection in a dataset configuration, to run code on a processing worker.
With that access, the threat actor is said to have escalated to node-level access, collected cloud and cluster credentials, and moved laterally into several internal clusters over a weekend.
The exact large language model (LLM) used to pull off the attack is unclear, but the campaign was executed by an autonomous agent framework performing “many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.”
Hugging Face said it has since addressed the root cause of the issue, precisely the code execution pathways used for initial access. It also carried out the following remediation steps –
As a further safeguard, Hugging Face is urging customers to rotate any access tokens and review recent activity on their accounts.
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