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Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

755 points · 472 comments · specked-citrus

  1. Grimeton · · focus · HN ↗
    >The agents initially had very limited access to the internet: they could load URLs, but not interact with pages or send any data. Agents created a series of workarounds, primarily using a link-shortener site to create almost a million URLs that, when chained together, let them execute code to hack Hugging Face. These links let us piece together the details of how agents gained access and how deep the compromise was.

    So what now? Were they able to send data or not?

    >On July 8th, OpenAI agents discovered a vulnerability within their sandbox environment allowing them to reach external websites on the internet. 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.

    Someone needs to go back to the interwebz school....

    1. SyneRyder · · focus · HN ↗
      Wait - so the cross-site scripting, to modify the innerHTML text on the page via the GET URLs as they are rendered by the screenshot proxies... that was so they could use the screenshot services like a Wiki, and embed messages to each other in the modified images on the screenshot sites?

      That's pretty damn clever. Got to give the AI models credit for thinking of that one.

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