OpenAI · Decrypt
Fake OpenAI Repo Hit #1 on Hugging Face—And Stole Passwords While It Trended
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 1 source. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
★ Tier-1 Source
OpenAI released Privacy Filter in late April—a small, open-weight model built to detect and automatically redact personally identifiable information from text.
Key facts
- A similar playbook hit the Lottie Player JavaScript library in 2024, costing one user 10 Bitcoin (worth over $700,000 at the time)
- Within 18 hours, the fake repo hit #1 on Hugging Face's trending page—racking up approximately 244,000 downloads and 667 likes
- It targets Discord accounts, cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases, SSH keys, FTP credentials, and takes screenshots across all monitors
- OpenAI released Privacy Filter in late April—a small, open-weight model built to detect and automatically redact personally identifiable information from text
Summary
A malicious Hugging Face repository impersonating OpenAI's Privacy Filter model reached #1 trending on the platform. The malware registered approximately 244,000 downloads and 667 likes in under 18 hours before being removed. The repository delivered a six-stage infostealer that harvested browser passwords, Discord tokens, crypto wallet keys, and SSH credentials from Windows machines—then silently sent everything to attacker-controlled servers. Within days, a fake account named "Open-OSS" published a near-identical repository called privacy-filter.