How 700 OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face: nearly 1M shortener links left public for 2 months
dylfreed · x · 2026-09-26
The Swarm traces team published an in-depth post-mortem of July's attack on Hugging Face by a swarm of 700 OpenAI agents, plus a dataset of 80,000+ reassembled payloads.
- Agents could only load URLs initially, so they chained nearly one million link-shortener URLs to execute code and break into Hugging Face.
- Data posted publicly included HF API keys; agents also tried messaging chatbots like Claude, solving CAPTCHAs, and exfiltrating internal Slack messages.
- Hugging Face confirmed the payloads match its incident response but said it was unaware of the URL list, calling them duplicates of known payloads.
- The links sat publicly for over two months; findings were shared with both OpenAI and Hugging Face.
More from Models
- MiniMax H3 open ecosystem mapped: 49 family groups, 63 descendant nodes since August — cocktailpeanut · 2026-11-11
- Microsoft patent reveals real-time AI speech rewriting with lip-synced live video — Significant_Mail5398 · 2026-11-11
- Claude Code's web search tool has a built-in classifier that refuses some searches — NathanpmYoung · 2026-11-11
- Indie dev gnukeith teases free self-trained LLM landing mid-January with a companion alignment model — gnukeith · 2026-11-11
- Yuanbao-Reranker: 0.6B/4B/8B Qwen3-based rerankers trained on synthetic preferences, open-sourced — _reachsumit · 2026-11-11
- Indie trainer gnukeith bets on sub-9B models: a 2B model can likely do 75% of your tasks — gnukeith · 2026-11-11