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Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

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Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#31

Post by permo-w »

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…

with a 1Gbps connection you're still looking at ~248 hours to download, and that's if the remote server can keep up, which it almost certainly can't

this is assuming by 1Gbps you mean 1 Gigabit/s rather than 1 Gigabyte/s

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#32

Post by robertlagrant »

numbsafari wrote: post #21
munchler wrote: post #13

> This case is an example of the new risks organizations face when starting to leverage the power of AI more broadly, as more of their engineers now work with massive amounts of training data. It seems like a stretch to associate this risk with AI specifically. The era of "big data" started several years before the current AI boom.

This is the risk of using, checks notes, Azure and working with Microsoft. Except there is no risk for them. They've proven time and again they have major security snafus and not be held accountable.

They have all the regulatory paperwork in place, so it must be fine.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#33

Post by cj »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #20

The article tries to play up the AI angle, but this was a pretty standard misconfiguration of a storage token. This kind of thing happens shockingly often, and it’s why frequent pentests are important.

> it’s why frequent pentests are important.

Unfortunately a lot of pen testing services have devolved into "We know you need a report for SOC 2, but don't worry, we can do some light security testing and generate a report for you in a few days and you'll be able to check the box for compliance"

Which is guess is better than nothing.

If anyone works at a company that does pen tests for compliance purposes, I'd recommend advocating internally for doing a "quick, easy, and cheap" pen test to "check the box" for compliance, _alongside_ a more comprehensive pen test (maybe call it something other than a "pen test" to convince internal stakeholders who might be afraid that a 2nd in depth pen test might weaken their compliance posture since the report is typically shared with sales prospects)

Ideally grey box or white box testing (provide access to codebase / infrastructure to make finding bugs easier). Most pen tests done for compliance purposes are black-box and limit their findings as a result.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#35

Post by sillysaurusx »

aftbit wrote: post #23
sillysaurusx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the OP but I have a pair of Chenbro NR12000 1U rack mount servers, bought for about $120 each on eBay a few years ago. Each has 12 internal 3.5" mounting points and 14 SATA cables. In one server, I have 12 4TB used enterprise drives. In the other, I have 12 8TB drives. Both have 16 GB of RAM (should probably be more) and two 2.5" SATA SSDs. They are configured with two ZFS raidz1 vdevs, each made up of 6 disks. T…

(Where are you finding friends with a NAS? Or at all, for that matter… guess I’ll look on eBay.)

Thank you for the details, particularly about zfs, which I know nothing about. The “if I’m lucky” part piqued my interest. HN was recently taken down by a double disk failure, which is exponentially more likely when you buy drives in bulk - the default case. So being able to survive two failures simultaneously is something I’d like to design for.

It’s cool you have two NASes (NASen?) let alone one. They’re the Pokémon of the tech world.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#36

Post by mavhc »

munchler wrote: post #13

> This case is an example of the new risks organizations face when starting to leverage the power of AI more broadly, as more of their engineers now work with massive amounts of training data. It seems like a stretch to associate this risk with AI specifically. The era of "big data" started several years before the current AI boom.

With big data comes big responsibility

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#37

Post by [deleted] »

permo-w wrote: post #31
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…

with a 1Gbps connection you're still looking at ~248 hours to download, and that's if the remote server can keep up, which it almost certainly can't this is assuming by 1Gbps you mean 1 Gigabit/s rather than 1 Gigabyte/s

[deleted]

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#38

Post by saurik »

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 implicate an AI-specific risk is how prevalent it is to use serialized Python objects to store these large opaque AI models, given how the Python serialization format was never exactly intended for untrusted data distribution and so is kind of effectively code... but stored in a way where both what that code says as well as that it is there at all is extremely obfuscated to people who download it.

> This is particularly interesting considering the repository’s original purpose: providing AI models for use in training code. The repository instructs users to download a model data file from the SAS link and feed it into a script. The file’s format is ckpt, a format produced by the TensorFlow library. It’s formatted using Python’s pickle formatter, which is prone to arbitrary code execution by design. Meaning, an attacker could have injected malicious code into all the AI models in this storage account, and every user who trusts Microsoft’s GitHub repository would’ve been infected by it.

Re: Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchers

#40

Post by datavirtue »

robertlagrant wrote: post #32
numbsafari wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the risk of using, checks notes, Azure and working with Microsoft. Except there is no risk for them. They've proven time and again they have major security snafus and not be held accountable.

They have all the regulatory paperwork in place, so it must be fine.

They are also the top line investment for the majority of mutual and pension funds. Don't crab too much, they are funding your retirement.
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