{"id":243435,"date":"2026-05-11T03:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T07:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/11\/fake-openai-privacy-filter-repo-hits-1-on-hugging-face-draws-244k-downloads\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T04:30:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T08:30:12","slug":"fake-openai-privacy-filter-repo-hits-1-on-hugging-face-draws-244k-downloads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/11\/fake-openai-privacy-filter-repo-hits-1-on-hugging-face-draws-244k-downloads\/","title":{"rendered":"Fake OpenAI Privacy Filter Repo Hits #1 on Hugging Face, Draws 244K Downloads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/fake-openai-privacy-filter-repo-hits-1.html\">Fake OpenAI Privacy Filter Repo Hits #1 on Hugging Face, Draws 244K Downloads<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/fake-openai-privacy-filter-repo-hits-1.html\">https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/fake-openai-privacy-filter-repo-hits-1.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-11 03:05:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"thehackernews.com\">thehackernews.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"p-author\">\ue804<span class=\"author\">Ravie Lakshmanan<\/span>\ue802<span class=\"author\">May 11, 2026<\/span><\/span><span class=\"p-tags\">Supply Chain Attack \/ Threat Intelligence<\/span><\/p>\n<p>A malicious Hugging Face repository managed to take a spot in the platform&#8217;s trending list by impersonating OpenAI&#8217;s Privacy Filter open-weight model to deliver a Rust-based information stealer to Windows users.<\/p>\n<p>The project, named Open-OSS\/privacy-filter, masqueraded as its legitimate counterpart, released by OpenAI late last month (openai\/privacy-filter), including copying the entire description verbatim to trick unsuspecting users into downloading it.Access to the malicious model has since been disabled by Hugging Face.<\/p>\n<p>Privacy Filter was unveiled in April 2026 by the artificial intelligence (AI) company as a way to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII) in unstructured text with an aim to incorporate strong privacy and security protections into applications.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The repository had typosquatted OpenAI&#8217;s legitimate Privacy Filter release, copied its model card nearly verbatim, and shipped a loader.py file that fetches and executes infostealer malware on Windows machines,&#8221; the HiddenLayer Research Team said in a report published last week.<\/p>\n<p>The malicious project instructs users to clone the repository and run a batch script (&#8220;start.bat&#8221;) for Windows or a Python script (&#8220;loader.py&#8221;) for Linux or macOS systems to configure all necessary dependencies and start the model.<\/p>\n<p>Once launched, the Python script triggers malicious code responsible for disabling SSL verification, decoding a Base64-encoded URL hosted on JSON Keeper, and using it to extract a command that&#8217;s passed to PowerShell for subsequent execution.The use of JSON Keeper, a public JSON paste service, as a dead drop resolver allows the attackers to switch payloads on the fly without the need for modifying the repository.<\/p>\n<p>The PowerShell command is used to download a batch script from a remote server (&#8220;api.eth-fastscan[.]org&#8221;) and launch it using &#8220;cmd.exe.&#8221;The batch script functions as a second-stage downloader&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/fake-openai-privacy-filter-repo-hits-1.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fake OpenAI Privacy Filter Repo Hits #1 on Hugging Face, Draws 244K Downloads https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/fake-openai-privacy-filter-repo-hits-1.html Publish&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":243437,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEiPtLFShq_XoM9Nzsl5kmSsF2UGsm6VhRoLNodcqRCdq45zqy4ekFVtamokNzEFifQknD502Wc0uFTBUdvLsBsYn4QAeVHSWLmhF2ROBMXutev8T6JjCGrrarzLhkSTUHLBq-nEWrF0WTb2epkX_3Ba5a6Gv_21R7PPQ_zCjhk7OU702Y10tJkcJiYG52D4\/s1600\/hugging-face-malware.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243438,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243435\/revisions\/243438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}