Dozens of fake AI models were found on the Hugging Face platform, which instead of delivering the promised features, were mining cryptocurrency on other people's graphics cards. Some of the dangerous files successfully passed security checks.
Dozens of fake AI models were found on the Hugging Face platform, which instead of delivering the promised features, were mining cryptocurrency on other people's graphics cards. Some of the dangerous files successfully passed security checks.
This is reported by BleepingComputer, citing Pluto Security researchers.
In total, the experts found 31 repositories with malicious files, which were hosted through 7 accounts. All of them pretended to be small test versions of the Qwen2 AI model. The malware was designed for Linux, an operating system often used to work with local AI models
When a developer downloaded such a model and allowed it to run its own code, a cryptocurrency mining program would be sent to the server along with it. It would disguise itself as a regular Linux process and, after stopping, would try to start again.
Some versions of the program were even more dangerous, as they allowed a hacker to connect to an infected computer via the Internet and execute commands on it without the owner's knowledge.
By October 28, the most popular malicious model had been downloaded 28,412 times. And the total number of downloads of all related models exceeded 32,000.
It turned out that security checks helped. Hugging Face scans downloaded files with antivirus and special tools, but they mostly look for already known threats. Therefore, malicious code that was launched along with the model could have gone unnoticed.
Hugging Face has already blocked the most popular malicious model. But at the time of BleepingComputer's publication, a nearly identical copy was still available.
Developers who launched these models are advised to check their computers for infection and change passwords and access keys. Simply removing the miner may not be enough, as the hacker may have left behind programs that allow him to reconnect to the system. If they cannot be completely removed, reinstalling the operating system may be necessary.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that vulnerabilities were found in two popular programming tools, OpenAI Codex and Microsoft VS Code, through which attackers could gain access to developers' files.
