Hundreds of LLM Servers Expose Corporate and Health Data

A new report finds that LLM automation tools and vector databases can be rife with sensitive data — and vulnerable to pilfering.

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Hundreds of open source large language model (LLM) builder servers and dozens of vector databases are leaking highly sensitive information to the open Web.

As companies rush to integrate AI into their business workflows, they occasionally pay insufficient attention to how to secure these tools, and the information they trust them with. In a new report, Legit security researcher Naphtali Deutsch demonstrated as much by scanning the Web for two kinds of potentially vulnerable open source (OSS) AI services: vector databases — which store data for AI tools — and LLM application builders — specifically, the open source program Flowise. The investigation unearthed a bevy of sensitive personal and corporate data, unknowingly exposed by organizations stumbling to get in on the generative AI revolution.

"A lot of programmers see these tools on the Internet, then try to set them up in their environment," Deutsch says, but those same programmers are leaving security considerations behind.

Hundreds of Unpatched Flowise Servers

Flowise is a low-code tool for building all kinds of LLM applications. It's backed by Y Combinator, and sports tens of thousands of stars on GitHub.

Whether it be a customer support bot or a tool for generating and extracting data for downstream programming and other tasks, the programs that developers build with Flowise tend to access and manage large quantities of data. It's no wonder, then, that the majority of Flowise servers are password-protected.

A password, however, isn't security enough...

Continue reading this article on our sister site, Dark Reading.

About the Authors

Nate Nelson

Contributor

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

Dark Reading

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