Microsoft has published a report today detailing a never-before-seen series of attacks against Kubeflow, a toolkit for running machine learning (ML) operations on top of Kubernetes clusters. The attacks have been going on since April this year, and Microsoft says its end-goal has been to install a cryptocurrency miner on Kubernetes clusters running Kubeflow instances exposed to the internet.
According to Yossi Weizman, a security researcher with Microsoft’s Azure Security Center, the company has detected these types of attacks against “tens of Kubernetes clusters” running Kubeflow.
But while the number of hijacked clusters is small in comparison to previous Kubernetes attacks, the profits for crooks and the financial losses to server owners are most likely much higher than other attacks seen before. “Nodes that are used for ML tasks are often relatively powerful, and in some cases include GPUs,” Weizman explained.
Source: ZDNet
