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Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

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Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#141

Post by anonymousDan »

saurik wrote: post #38

A number of replies here are noting (correctly) how this doesn't have much to do with AI (despite some sentences in this article kind of implicating it; the title doesn't really, fwiw) and is more of an issue with cloud providers, confusing ways in which security tokens apply to data being shared publicly, and dealing with big data downloads (which isn't terribly new)... ...but one notable way in which it does implic…

For me it's also interesting as a potential pathway for data poisoning attacks - if you have control over the data used to train a production model, can you modify the dataset such that it inserts a backdoor to any model trained subsequently trained over it? E.g. what if gpt was biased to insert certain security vulnerabilities as part of its codegen capabilities?

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#142

Post by buro9 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #12
buro9 wrote: post #5

Part of me thought "this is fine as very few could actually download 38TB". But that's not true as it's just so cheap to spin up a machine and some storage on a Cloud provider and deal with it later. It's also not true as I've got a 1Gbps internet connection and 112TB usable in my local NAS. All of a sudden (over a decade) all the numbers got big and massive data exfiltration just looks to be trivial. I mean, obvious…

How do you have your NAS configured? The more specifics, the better; I’ve wanted one. Do you worry about failure? In your hardware life I mean, not your personal life.

I just have a Synology DS1821+ which has (8 * HDD bays) + (2 * M2 slots). The bays I've filled with 18TB HDDs (I chose Toshiba N300 as they do not use SMR). The M2 slots I've put a couple of 1TB M2 drives in as an SSD cached (they better allow the HDDs to hibernate for frequently accessed files like music).

I've got these in an SHR configuration (Synology Hybrid Raid with 1 disk of protection) which means about 115-6TB of usable space and allowing for single drive failure.

The filesystem is BTRFS ( https://daltondur.st/syno_btrfs_1/ ).

I upgraded the RAM (Synology will forever nag about it not being their RAM https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/kaq7ks/how_to_dis... ).

I have the option in future to purchase the network card to take that to 10Gbps ports rather than 1Gbps ports.

So that's the first... but then I have a second one... which is an older DS1817+ which is filled with 10TB HDDs and yields 54.5TB usable in SHR2 + BTRFS... which I use as a backup to the first, but as it's smaller just the really important stuff and it is disconnected and powered down mostly, it's a monthly chore to connect it, and rsync things over. Typically if I want to massively expand a NAS (every - 10 years) I will buy a whole new one and relegate the existing to be a backup device. Meaning an enclosure has on avg about 15y of life in it and amortises really well as being initially the primary, and then later the backup.

I do _not_ use any of the Synology software, it's just a file system... I prefer to keep my NAS simple and offload any compute to other small devices/machines. This is in part because of the length of time I keep these things in service... the software is nearly always the weakest link here.

You can build your own NAS, TrueNAS Core (nee FreeNAS) https://www.truenas.com/freenas/ is very good... but for me, a NAS is always on and the low power performance of this purpose built devices and their ability to handle environmental conditions (I am not doing anything special for cooling, etc) and the long-term updates to the OS, etc... makes it quite compelling.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#143

Post by Faelian2 »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #69
mymac wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pentests where people actually get out of bed to do stuff (read code, read API docs etc) and then try to really hack your system are rare. Pentests where people go through the motions, send you report with a few unimportant bits highlit while patting you on the back for your exemplary security so you can check the box on whatever audit you're going through are common.

Yep, most pentests go through the OWASP list and call it done.

Honestly, the OWASP top ten is generic enough that most vulnerability fit in it : "injection", "security misconfiguration", "insecure design".

The problem is

1. knowing the gazillion of web vulnerabilities, and technologies

2. being good enough to tests them

3. kick yourself and go through the laborious process of understand and test every key feature of the target.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#144

Post by ozim »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #67

Two of the things that make me cringe are mentioned. Pickle files and SAS tokens. I get nervous dealing with Azure storage. Use RBAC. They should depreciate SAS and account keys IMO. SOC2 type auditing should have been done here so I am surprised of the reach. Having the SAS with no expiry and then the deep level of access it gave including machine backups with their own tokens. A lot of lack of defence in depth goin…

So SAS tokens are worse that some admin setting up "FileDownloaderAccount" and then sharing its password with multiple users or using the same for different applications?

I take SAS tokens with expiration over people setting up shared RBAC account and sharing password for it.

Yes people should do proper RBAC, but point a company and I will find dozens "shared" accounts. People don't care and don't mind. When beating them up with sticks does not solve the issue SAS tokens while still not perfect help quite a lot.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#145

Post by nbk_2000 »

prmoustache wrote: post #127
j245 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding as a non security expert: Pentest comes across more as checking all the common attack vectors don’t exist. Getting out of bed to do the so-called “real stuff” is typically called a bug bounty program or security researching. Both exist and I don’t see why most companies couldn’t start a bug bounty program if they really cared a lot about the “real stuff”

pentest means penetration testing which mean one need to take the attacker hat and try to enter your network or the app infrastructure and get as much data as he can, be it institutionnal or customer data. It can be through technical means as well as social engineering practices. And then report back. This is in no way related to a bug bounty program.

Counter point: Most of the top rated Bug Bounty hunters have a background in penetration testing.

I think it's more accurate to say Bug Bounty only covers a small subset of penetration testing (mainly in that escalation and internal pivoting are against the BB policy of most companies).

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#146

Post by bob1029 »

unoti wrote: post #119
wodenokoto wrote: post #63

I really dislike how Azure makes you juggle keys in order to make any two Azure things talk together. Even more so, you only have two keys for the entire storage account. Would have made much more sense if you could have unlimited, named keys for each container.

> I really dislike how Azure makes you juggle keys in order to make any two Azure things talk together. Actually there is a better way. Look into “Managed Identity”. This allows you to grant access from one service to another, for example grant access to allow a specific VM to work with your storage account.

This is what we are using for everything. It makes life so much easier.

So far, our new Azure tenant has absolutely zero passwords or shared secrets to keep track of.

Granting a function app access to SQL Server by way of the app's name felt like some kind of BS magic trick to me at first. But it absolutely works. Experiences like this give me hope for the future.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#148

Post by csydas »

j245 wrote: post #75
mymac wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pentests where people actually get out of bed to do stuff (read code, read API docs etc) and then try to really hack your system are rare. Pentests where people go through the motions, send you report with a few unimportant bits highlit while patting you on the back for your exemplary security so you can check the box on whatever audit you're going through are common.

From my understanding as a non security expert: Pentest comes across more as checking all the common attack vectors don’t exist. Getting out of bed to do the so-called “real stuff” is typically called a bug bounty program or security researching. Both exist and I don’t see why most companies couldn’t start a bug bounty program if they really cared a lot about the “real stuff”

I think the concern is more about the theatre of most modern pen-testing rather than expecting deep bug-bounty work. I'm not a security expert either, but I've had to refute "security expert" consultations from pen-test companies, and the reports are absolutely asinine half the time and filled with so many false positives due to very weak signature matching that they're more or less useless and give a false sense of security.

For example, dealing with a "legal threat" situation with the product I work on because a client got hit by ransomware and they blame our product because "we just got a security assessment saying everything was fine, and your product is the only other thing on the servers" -- checked the report, basically it just runs some extremely basic port checks/windows config checks that haven't been relevant for years and didn't even apply to the Windows versions they had, and in the end the actual attack came from someone in their company opening a malicious email and having a .txt file with passwords.

I don't doubt there are proper security firms out there, but I rarely encounter them.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#149

Post by int0x2e »

buro9 wrote: post #5

Part of me thought "this is fine as very few could actually download 38TB". But that's not true as it's just so cheap to spin up a machine and some storage on a Cloud provider and deal with it later. It's also not true as I've got a 1Gbps internet connection and 112TB usable in my local NAS. All of a sudden (over a decade) all the numbers got big and massive data exfiltration just looks to be trivial. I mean, obvious…

It's much worse - if the data isn't just a ton of tiny files, and you're able to spin up a bunch of workers for parallelism, you can get up to 120 Gbps per storage account (without going to the extreme of requiring a special quota increase).

That means in a little bit over 5 minutes, the data could have been downloaded by someone. Even most well run security teams won't be able to respond quickly enough for that type of event.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#150

Post by wolftickets »

saurik wrote: post #38

A number of replies here are noting (correctly) how this doesn't have much to do with AI (despite some sentences in this article kind of implicating it; the title doesn't really, fwiw) and is more of an issue with cloud providers, confusing ways in which security tokens apply to data being shared publicly, and dealing with big data downloads (which isn't terribly new)... ...but one notable way in which it does implic…

Disclosure I work for the company that released this: https://github.com/protectai/modelscan but we do have a tool to support scanning many models for this kind of problem.

That said you should be using something like safe-tensors.

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