Attackers are leveraging a vulnerability in Anyscale’s Ray AI software to compromise enterprise servers and saddle them with cryptominers and reverse shells.
“We observed hundreds of compromised clusters in the past three weeks alone. Each cluster uses a public IP address, and most clusters contain hundreds to thousands of servers. There are hundreds of servers that are still vulnerable and exposed.”
The open-source Ray framework is used for scaling AI and Python applications from a laptop to a cluster and to accelerate machine learning workloads.
The attackers did not just use the Ray clusters for covert cryptomining – they also installed reverse shells, to establish a permanent connection with the servers and allow them to control them remotely.
“AI production workloads were compromised, meaning an attacker could affect an AI model’s integrity or accuracy, steal models, and infect models during the training phase,” the researchers added.
“We know that truly, crypto mining is one of the better-case scenarios. If the attackers had chosen instead to create malicious models and alter the output of AI being used in sensitive applications, the impact could be enormous,” he commented.
