hacke an artist website and threaten to use their works to train AI

The attacks with ransomware They have brought to people and companies around the world. It consists of a type of malware that figure our data and makes the use of the equipment impossible until we pay the rescue that the attackers ask for. Is What happened to Telefónica in 2017 And what has just happened to Artists & Clients, a website on which artists can find customers to sell their works. The difference is that hackers are threatening to use all their artistic work at AI.

The hacking. They tell it in 404Media. The hacking happened on August 30, when the Message from the attackers which said: “This website has been pirated by Lunalock. All its data, including email addresses and passwords of the user accounts, have been stolen and encrypted.” Shortly after the web fell and while I write these lines It continues to be inaccessible. At the moment those responsible for the web have not issued any statement and in their social networks there is no communication, but some artists who are on the platform They have expressed their concern in Reddit.

Redoubled the threat. The message of hackers is a standard text in this type of attacks: if the payment was not made, all the data would be filtered, including the source code and the personal information of the users. The striking was at the end of his message: “We will send all the illustrations to artificial intelligence companies so that they are added to the training data sets.” In statements to 404Media, a researcher at the Flare cybersecurity company says that “it is the first time I see an attack using AI models as part of her extortion tactics.”

AI and art. It has been a matter of debate since the arrival of the first models of image generation, who were trained with hundreds of works by real artists without permission. Some artists have sued the companies of AIothers their works began to “poison” to go crazy to AI and have even been created Applications to prevent a work from being training at AI. It is a delicate issue for artists and hackers have used it to raise the tone of their threat.

AI to do evil. Lunalock’s case is curious because they do not use AI directly, but use it as another argument to its threat. However, there are cybercriminals who are using AI to make their most effective attacksfor example to program more easily or automate technical operations. A few days ago, Wired echoed an ESET report where they detailed how the attackers were using generative to execute ransomware attacks.

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