OpenAI breached by hacker in 2023 – report

By Martyn Landi for The Independent
Friday, July 5, 2024

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OpenAI has been contacted for comment.

Dr Ilia Kolochenko, cybersecurity expert and chief executive at security firm ImmuniWeb, warned that attacks on AI firms are likely to continue, and increase, given the growing importance of the technology.

“While the details of the alleged incident are not yet confirmed by OpenAI, there is a strong possibility that the incident actually took place and is not the only one,” he said.

“The global AI race has become a matter of national security for many countries; therefore, state-backed cybercrime groups and mercenaries are aggressively targeting AI vendors, from talented start-ups to tech giants like Google or OpenAI.

“The hackers mostly focus their efforts on the theft of valuable intellectual property, including technological research and know-how, large language models (LLMs), sources of training data, as well as commercial information such as AI vendors’ clients and novel use of AI across different industries. “More sophisticated cyber-threat actors may also implant stealthy backdoors to continually control breached AI companies, and to be able to suddenly disrupt or even shut down their operations, similar to the large-scale hacking campaigns targeting critical national infrastructure (CNI) in Western countries recently.

“All corporate users of GenAI vendors should be particularly careful and prudent when they share, or give access to, their proprietary data for LLM training or fine-tuning, as their data – spanning from attorney-client privileged information and trade secrets of the leading industrial or pharmaceutical companies to classified military information – is also in the crosshairs of AI-hungry cybercriminals that are poised to intensify their attacks.” Read Full Article