Vertex AI | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security "blind spot" in Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform that could allow artificial intelligence (AI) agents to be weaponized by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and compromise an organization's cloud environment. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, the issue relates to how the Vertex AI permission model can be misused by taking advantage of the service agent 's excessive permission scoping by default. "A misconfigured or compromised agent can become a 'double agent' that appears to serve its intended purpose, while secretly exfiltrating sensitive data, compromising infrastructure, and creating backdoors into an organization's most critical systems," Unit 42 researcher Ofir Shaty said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Specifically, the cybersecurity company found that the Per-Project, Per-Product Service Agent ( P4SA ) associated with a deployed AI agent ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two security flaws in Google's Vertex machine learning (ML) platform that, if successfully exploited, could allow malicious actors to escalate privileges and exfiltrate models from the cloud. "By exploiting custom job permissions, we were able to escalate our privileges and gain unauthorized access to all data services in the project," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Ofir Balassiano and Ofir Shaty said in an analysis published earlier this week. "Deploying a poisoned model in Vertex AI led to the exfiltration of all other fine-tuned models, posing a serious proprietary and sensitive data exfiltration attack risk." Vertex AI is Google's ML platform for training and deploying custom ML models and artificial intelligence (AI) applications at scale. It was first introduced in May 2021. Crucial to leveraging the privilege escalation flaw is a feature called Vertex AI Pipelines , which allows users to automat...