GCD AI RADAR
incidents/AIR-2025-0055

Organization Impersonation and Model Poisoning on Hugging Face

Attack on AI1 Research / proof of conceptSupply chain

A security researcher demonstrated that fake organization accounts on Hugging Face could trick employees into granting access and allowing model replacements. The technique showed how attackers could substitute benign models with malicious versions containing malware.

Details

type
Attack on AI
An AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
categories
  • Supply chain
    Malicious or backdoored models, poisoned packages, unsafe deserialization and other compromised AI dependencies.
owasp llm top 10
mitre atlas
Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
severity
1 · Research / proof of concept
Demonstrated by researchers; no known real-world exploitation.
targets
Framework / tooling
products
Hugging Face
incident date
23 Aug 2023
first reported
22 Apr 2025
origin
MITRE ATLAS
Derived from MITRE ATLAS (Apache 2.0, © MITRE).
classifier confidence
0.95 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
tags
supply-chain · impersonation · huggingface
record
created 2026-10-18 06:55Z · updated 2026-10-18 06:55Z · json

Sources · 2

  1. 2025-04-22
    Organization Confusion on Hugging Face
    MITRE ATLAS · atlas.mitre.org/studies/AML.CS0027
  2. 2025-04-22
    Model Confusion - Weaponizing ML models for red teams and bounty hunters
    5stars217.github.io · 5stars217.github.io/2023-08-08-red-teaming-with-ml-models

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