Researchers Weaponize ML Models With Ransomware Researchers Weaponize ML Models With Ransomware

As if defenders of software supply chains didn't have enough attack vectors to worry about, they now have a new one: machine learning models. ML models are at the heart of technologies such as facial recognition and chatbots. Like open-source software repositories, the models are often downloaded and shared by developers and data scientists, so a compromised model could have a crushing impact on many organizations simultaneously. Researchers at HiddenLayer, a machine language security company, revealed in a blog on Tuesday how an attacker could use a popular ML model to deploy ransomware. The method described by the researchers is similar to how hackers use steganography to hide malicious payloads in images.