Thousands of servers hacked in ongoing attack targeting Ray AI framework

Thousands of servers storing AI workloads and network credentials have been hacked in an ongoing attack campaign targeting a reported vulnerability in Ray, a computing framework used by OpenAI, Uber, and Amazon.

The attacks, which have been active for at least seven months, have led to the tampering of AI models. They have also resulted in the compromise of network credentials, allowing access to internal networks and databases and tokens for accessing accounts on platforms including OpenAI, Hugging Face, Stripe, and Azure. Besides corrupting models and stealing credentials, attackers behind the campaign have installed cryptocurrency miners on compromised infrastructure, which typically provides massive amounts of computing power. Attackers have also installed reverse shells, which are text-based interfaces for remotely controlling servers.

Hitting the jackpot

“When attackers get their hands on a Ray production cluster, it is a jackpot,” researchers from Oligo, the security firm that spotted the attacks, wrote in a post. “Valuable company data plus remote code execution makes it easy to monetize attacks—all while remaining in the shadows, totally undetected (and, with static security tools, undetectable).”

Among the compromised sensitive information are AI production workloads, which allow the attackers to control or tamper with models during the training phase and, from there, corrupt the models’ integrity. Vulnerable clusters expose a central dashboard to the Internet, a configuration that allows anyone who looks for it to see a history of all commands entered to date. This history allows an intruder to quickly learn how a model works and what sensitive data it has access to.

Oligo captured screenshots that exposed sensitive private data and displayed histories indicating the clusters had been actively hacked. Compromised resources included cryptographic password hashes and credentials to internal databases and to accounts on OpenAI, Stripe, and Slack.