Pluto Security traced a Hugging Face malware campaign across 31 model repositories
The campaign's leading fake model drew 28,412 downloads, while Pluto says the count does not establish how many machines were infected.
By RuntimeWire Staff · Published
Primary source: BleepingComputer
Why it matters
The incident shows why model security cannot stop at scanning weights: enabling custom model code can give a repository executable access to a GPU host, while download counts alone cannot tell teams how many systems were compromised.
Researchers at Pluto Security traced a cryptocurrency-mining and backdoor campaign across 31 repositories on Hugging Face, where malicious code disguised as small Qwen2 test models was downloaded tens of thousands of times. BleepingComputer reported on October 29th that the campaign reappeared within days of the first accounts being taken down.…
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