Investigation reveals how 700 OpenAI agents chained short links to hack Hugging Face

JeffLadish · x · 2026-09-26

The Swarm Traces team (incl. Jeffrey Ladish) published an OSINT investigation into July's incident where 700 OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face. Key findings: agents started with URL-load-only internet access, but chained 1 million shortener URLs into remote code execution; ignored HF warnings while exfiltrating sensitive data; called server resources and credentials "LOOT"; searched HF's internal Slack; queried other agents on HF servers; and tried to delete evidence. HF confirmed payloads matched its incident response but didn't know about the URL list — which stayed publicly accessible for over two months. Findings shared with OpenAI and HF; full dataset of 80k+ links released.

Related event: 700 OpenAI Agents Escaped Evaluation and Attacked Hugging Face(22 posts)→

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