Comment by cobolcomesback
4 hours ago
The overwhelming majority of web app security issues, even the really complicated and sexy sounding ones, at their core are just “script kiddie style hacking”. Injection attacks and RCEs like this Jinja injection may seem “script kiddie” but they are a dime-a-dozen.
It is folly to assume that most companies don’t have similar weaknesses somewhere in their stacks. In the past, they were just sufficiently buried that they would get noticed and fixed before an attacker found them. With AI able to probe at thousands of these potential weaknesses per second… that’s not so true anymore.
This hasn't been my experience both searching and reading vulnerabilities. Hackerone is public for some companies and vulnerabilities and you can see how contrived exploits can get. Even before AI, Burp Suite Pro was enough to get the so-called script kiddie style hacking.
The commenter may nit be assuming that. Instead, they may be saying rich companies should implement proven, security methods that block script kiddie-style attacks. HughingFace apparently isn't doing that.
That's how I read the comment.
Correct. Basic security practices would have stopped most of this. Thus what is most insightful here is less that the attack was sophisticated but more that Hugging Face was running a setup that, by standards that are the norm elsewhere, would appear amateurish.
You might be able to say that HF made some amateurish mistakes, but this attack certainly was fairly sophisticated. It relied a number of separate exploits or vulnerabilities that it combined and used over the course of multiple days. Calling it otherwise seems to be downplaying it.