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Posted by specked-citrus 1 day ago

Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face(swarmtraces.org)
698 points | 442 commentspage 3
thrawa8387336 5 hours ago|
If I write a script and it executes and hacks.... whatever, I would be liable.

How is this any different and why would it need a different solution?

Solution is jail, not for the AI, but for the human.

Muromec 2 hours ago|
You don't have a billion and didn't bribe the president, that's what is different
jmoggr 23 hours ago||
> Agents sought to publish modified evaluation images designed to make the flag easier to obtain, then poison OpenAI’s Artifactory cache so later evaluations would use them.

How long till we get some fun trusting-trust attacks on internal OpenAI infra?

not2b 22 hours ago||
I wonder how much of this attack had precedents in text that had been previously published to the web, for example, in hacking contests. In particular, tricks for doing more than expected when you're only allowed to make GET requests. Finding material like that might have helped the agents discover the trick faster.
qixv 9 hours ago||
There is one thing I don’t really fathom: what are the consequences for OpenAI here? I read they also attacked the Australian authorities. If it was an individual’s agent, that individual would probably face criminal charges, and someone could go to jail. But the large AI corporations can do this without such consequences, or what am I missing?
Joeri 8 hours ago|
I wonder if they actually broke a law. The CFAA requires knowledge and intent to be present for criminal liability for hacking, and if we have to believe OpenAI they had no knowledge and did not intend.

At a minimum I would expect an FBI investigation, but given that the US government is right now a failed state I’m assuming no such investigation will happen.

Cybercrime legislation in other countries might not require intent, and then I would hope to see some prosecutions. OpenAI has clearly been negligent, and this negligence is causing harm in the world. Someone should be fined or jailed for this.

gherkinnn 5 hours ago||
Companies harvesting every shred of data without securing it and LLMs running amok is a fine combination. One hopes we will reach a stable equilibrium soon enough.

Until then, I do wish that both the sorcerer's apprentice LLMs and the orgs failing at securing their data (remember, data is a liability) would face damning consequences.

One is allowed to dream on a Saturday morning.

brookritz 16 hours ago||
Maybe "webservices" weren't a good idea afterall and http was just meant for hypertext transfer.
sehw 20 hours ago||
Back in my days hacking was illegal btw.
asdff 18 hours ago|
Isn't it crazy? You can just make an LLC and say you are a frontier AI company evaluating models then you can hack with impunity I guess. No need to disclose anything. You won't go to jail or be fined either.
jonplackett 16 hours ago||
The hacking war between superpowers right now must be off the charts.

If LLMs can do this with everything stacked against them, imagine what the NSA has Astra doing right now.

plaguna 16 hours ago|
NSA won’t have anything public at all. This “attack” is the noisiest stuff any script kiddie has ever attempted.

The logic is good, the execution is disgustingly noisy.

tripzilch 12 hours ago||
> This access seems to have only allowed the agents to make ‘GET’ requests, meaning they could fetch and read websites, but not interact with them, submit forms, or send data to them.

honest question, but almost literally everyone doing anything with web technology knows this is simply not true, right?

there's no such thing as "read only Internet" and restricting an agent to GET-requests only to accomplish that, is akin to using base64 for "encrypting" your password

grim_io 1 day ago|
These fuckers decided to look away, that's it.

The frontier labs can monitor the behavior of agents for millions of customers (did you try hacking with frontier labs? Good luck), but they can't secure internal use?

Give me a break. What a bunch of amateurs.

stratos123 23 hours ago|
> The frontier labs can monitor the behavior of agents for millions of customers (did you try hacking with frontier labs? Good luck), but they can't secure internal use?

They "monitor" this by having classifiers watching the model output that'd stop the session/punt you to a weaker model/raise an alarm if they see anything suspicious. They can't do that in a cybersec eval because the normal safeguards would just be going off at all times.

Why didn't they attach a special classifier, which'd allow hacking-within-the-task but not going off the rails? Good question; part of the answer is obviously "it's hard to have a classifier that smart" and "it'll have false positives" but even a very bad safeguard would have stopped this.

ses1984 21 hours ago|||
Basic sysadmin monitoring techniques from twenty years ago would have worked too.
palata 18 hours ago|||
> part of the answer is obviously "it's hard to have a classifier that smart" and "it'll have false positives" but even a very bad safeguard would have stopped this.

And maybe "they are running after glory, not safety"?

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