External Harms
Adversaries may abuse their access to a victim system and use its resources or capabilities to further their goals by causing harms external to that system. These harms could affect the organization (e.g. Financial Harm, Reputational Harm), its users (e.g. User Harm), or the general public (e.g. Societal Harm).
> sub-techniques
> curated attacks (11)
Fake OpenAI 'Privacy Filter' Model on Hugging Face Pushes Infostealer
A repository typosquatting OpenAI's Privacy Filter release copied the model card nearly verbatim and shipped a loader that fetched and ran infostealer malware. It hit #1 trending on Hugging Face with 244,000+ downloads in under 18 hours.
Model Distillation Campaigns Targeting Anthropic Claude
Anthropic uncovered competitor labs harvesting Claude's outputs at scale — roughly 24,000 accounts and 16 million queries — to distill its agentic reasoning, code, tool-use, and computer-use capabilities into rival models. Model theft by imitation, laundered through ordinary API access.
ForcedLeak: CRM Data Exfiltration from Salesforce Agentforce
Malicious instructions embedded in a Web-to-Lead submission were later executed by Salesforce Agentforce during normal employee use, exfiltrating CRM data through an attacker-acquired domain still on Salesforce's CSP allowlist — bought for $5.
Invitation Is All You Need: Hijacking Gemini to Control a Smart Home
Malicious instructions hidden in a Google Calendar invitation title were executed when Gemini later summarized the user's schedule — triggering real-world actions through connected Google Home tools: opening windows, turning off lights, and starting a boiler.
LLM Grooming: Flooding Training Data to Seed Disinformation
A pro-Kremlin website network mass-published millions of propaganda articles, seemingly to seep into the data that trains and grounds LLMs. An audit found leading chatbots repeated the network's false claims about a third of the time — a data-integrity attack on the model supply chain.
AIKatz: Stealing Auth Tokens from LLM Desktop Applications
Researchers extracted authentication tokens from the memory of LLM desktop apps (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot). With a stolen token, an attacker impersonates the victim to the LLM backend — lateral movement into the user's AI account.
Live Deepfake Injection to Evade Mobile KYC Verification
A red team defeated a mobile facial-authentication / KYC service by injecting a live, face-swapped deepfake video into the camera feed — impersonating a target and passing liveness checks to open fraudulent accounts.
Hacking ChatGPT's Long-Term Memory with Prompt Injection
A prompt injection hidden in a shared document wrote false, persistent 'memories' into ChatGPT's long-term memory. Because memories survive across sessions, the planted instructions could exfiltrate future conversations indefinitely.
ShadowRay: Exploiting Exposed Ray AI Compute Clusters
Ray's Job API allows remote execution by design and ships without authentication. Thousands of internet-exposed clusters let attackers run code, steal cloud credentials and AI artifacts, and hijack GPUs for cryptomining.
Organization Confusion on Hugging Face: Impersonation to Reverse Shell
A researcher registered Hugging Face organization accounts impersonating real companies. Employees uploaded private models to the fake orgs — which could be swapped for poisoned models carrying reverse-shell payloads that execute when loaded.
Code Execution & API-Key Theft in MathGPT via Prompt Injection
A public Streamlit app turned GPT-3 output into executed Python. A prompt-injection payload made the model emit code that read the host's environment variables, exfiltrated the app's OpenAI API key, and crashed the service.