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Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

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Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#131

Post by BonerWiener »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #48
xg15 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2 - there is no way openai did not train the model to conduct attacks like these. i would really like openai to comment on the post training of this model but they probably won't, eh? Even if they wanted, I'm not sure they'd be even allowed to or if that kind of postmortem would be classified in the name of "national security"...

Hopefully there will be a criminal investigation. Or the government will create some sort of agency to investigate incidents like this.

> Or the government will create some sort of agency to investigate incidents like this

I doubt that the government would try to hinder any western AI companies.

Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#132

Post by sobellian »

genericone wrote: post #120
AlienRobot wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I think it's interesting is that with the total lack of common sense the AI just goes on random tangents to achieve the target in a "monkey paw" way. Can you imagine if this happened: User: what is the shortest route from my home to the super market? AI: the user wants to know the shortest route to the super market. I should use a worm hole.

User: what is the shortest route from my home to the super market? AI: the user wants to know, how do I make the super market my new home. Failing that, how do I make my home a super market.

Just don't ask what the shortest path is to food.

Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#133

Post by maxnevermind »

> the agent happened to escape via a 0-day exploit from the package proxy cache to access the internet

I have same familiarity with JFrog Artifactory(which they used in this case) and I'm confused with how you can gain access to the internet through it, even in theory. Isn't JFrog just exposed with a basic REST API for package upload/extraction? I'm not a security expert but how is that possible to get internet access through simple GET/PUT request API?

Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#134

Post by simonw »

onesociety2022 wrote: post #116
simonw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the third-party sandbox was hosted by Modal: https://www.reuters.com/business/openais-rogue-agent-comprom... > "We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution," Bubna said in a statement. "This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in anyway."

They don't seem to explain how it managed to find this unauthenticated endpoint hosted on Modal's platform.

Modal are a hosting provider. It sounds to me like someone building on Modal deployed their own product that had an unauthenticated endpoint that could be used to launch and interact with a container.

Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#135

Post by sourdecor »

wxw wrote: post #72

> the agent happened to escape via a 0-day exploit from the package proxy cache to access the internet > The agent found an unsecured, user-hosted public endpoint designed to allow running arbitrary code for CyberGym-style tasks on third-party sandbox infrastructure (Modal) > On this external sandbox, the agent abused an existing CyberGym execution harness [...] The agent repurposed this harness to run arbitrary shel…

I keep waiting for an AI to exfiltrate itself. That is going to be cool to read about.

Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#136

Post by wonnage »

maxnevermind wrote: post #133

> the agent happened to escape via a 0-day exploit from the package proxy cache to access the internet I have same familiarity with JFrog Artifactory(which they used in this case) and I'm confused with how you can gain access to the internet through it, even in theory. Isn't JFrog just exposed with a basic REST API for package upload/extraction? I'm not a security expert but how is that possible to get internet acces…

The package cache proxy is usually used to fetch from the public repository (npm, rubygems, etc.) so I think it could be feasible to craft some package metadata to trick it into GETing unexpected things. PUT/POST could be possible via attempting to publish

Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#137

Post by uselessTA »

reducesuffering wrote: post #64
heaney-555 wrote: post #50

Where are all the "this was just a marketing stunt" people now?

They won't admit they're wrong for a long time, because denial in the face of an abhorrently scary future is very instinctual. There are people still fighting against evidence of climate change which is less severe...

>There are people still fighting against evidence of climate change which is less severe...

Remains to be seen how severe, and unlike climate change there's a lot more uncertainty. Though it's conceivably more extremely catastrophic

Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#138

Post by thundergolfer »

simonw wrote: post #104
log101 wrote: post #101

I have never seen people this hyped and excited about a security incident.

That's because most incidents aren't nearly this much fun! It's a proper paperclip-maximizer science-fiction scenario, it happened entirely by accident, it involved one (very high profile) company hacking TWO other companies (Modal and Hugging Face), and aside from pride and wasted time nobody was hurt .

Modal was not hacked. A Modal customer left an unauthenticated web endpoint running on Modal which could be used for code compilation and execution.

See https://modal.com/blog/a-note-on-the-hugging-face-agent-inci... for details.

Re: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

#140

Post by koyote »

SaucyWrong wrote: post #7

Something about this attack that has been unsettling to me is that without safety refusals the model did a lot of interesting counter-security work in order to cheat on the requested evaluation. Like, it demonstrated interesting exploit achievements because it didn’t “feel like” doing the exercise, which is unsettling because presumably it could do the same thing with any work I tried to delegate to it, and might in…

This is definitely weird and I'd love to see the prompt.

Why would the model spend 4 days hacking into a machine if it is clever enough to just 'solve' the issue given? So either the AI is actually not very clever or useful ("Write fizz-buzz" - "Sure, let me just invent a new programming language first"). or the prompt was nudging it towards such a scenario.

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