AI company Hugging Face faces cyberattack carried out by an AI agent: AI vs AI?
An artificial intelligence (AI) company Hugging Face has revealed that it recently came under a cyber attack not carried out by a human but an AI agent. AI getting attacked by AI?
Hackers have been adapting to AI to find the security flaws in online infrastructure and exploit them; however, what happened with Hugging Face has never been experienced before.
The NYC-based company said: “The cyber attack was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system.”
It seemed like an AI vs AI attack as the company fought back using its own large language model (LLM) to analyse the attack, find the loophole in its infrastructure and defend itself.
What makes this stand out isn’t really the method, code injection through a malicious file is a familiar trick. It’s the fact that an AI agent ran the entire operation on its own, deciding what to target and how to move, at a speed no human hacker typing commands could match.
The company still doesn’t know exactly which AI model was behind the attack, whether it was a jailbroken version of a commercial system or an open-weight model with no built-in restrictions at all.
As for the damage, Hugging Face says a limited number of internal datasets and several service credentials were accessed without authorization.
