Mercor, a startup that provides training data to major AI companies, has admitted to being the victim of a security breach that may have exposed sensitive company and user data.
The three-year-old startup has a market capitalization of $10 billion and employs experts in fields ranging from medicine to law to literature to help provide data that improves the capabilities of its AI models. Customers include Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.
Unconfirmed reports circulating online suggest that datasets used by some of Mercor’s customers and information about those customers’ secret AI projects may have been compromised in the breach.
The incident was related to a supply chain attack involving LiteLLM, a widely used open source library for connecting applications to AI services.
The company confirmed that luck The company was “one of thousands” affected by the supply chain attack against LiteLLM, which is associated with a hacker group called TeamPCP. Melkor spokeswoman Heidi Hagberg said: The company said it “acted quickly” to contain and remediate the incident, and said a third-party forensic investigation was underway.
“The privacy and security of our customers and contractors is fundamental to everything we do at Mercor,” Hagberg said. “We will continue to communicate directly with customers and contractors as necessary and commit the necessary resources to resolve issues as quickly as possible.”
Melkor is widely considered one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups, having raised $350 million in a Series C round led by venture capital firm Felicis Ventures last October.
According to security firm Snyk, the TeamPCP hacking group embedded malicious code within LiteLLM, a tool developers use to connect applications to AI services from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. This tool is typically downloaded millions of times a day. The code was designed to harvest credentials and spread widely throughout the industry before being identified and removed within hours of discovery.
Lapsus$, a notorious extortion hacking group, later claimed to have targeted Mercor and accessed its data. It was not immediately clear how the gang obtained the data, and Melkor did not respond to specific questions from the organization. luck Regarding the hacker group’s claims. TeamPCP is believed to have recently begun working with Lapsus$ and other groups specializing in ransomware and extortion, according to security researchers at cybersecurity firm Wiz cited in an article in Infosecurity Magazine.
TeamPCP is known for engineering so-called supply chain attacks that embed malware within widely used codebases or software libraries when programmers write their own code. In contrast, Lapsus$ is an older hacker group known for social engineering and phishing attacks focused on stealing users’ login credentials and using those credentials to access and steal sensitive data.
According to TechCrunch, Lapsus$ has published samples of the allegedly stolen data on its leak site, including what appears to be Slack data, internal ticketing information, and two videos that allegedly show conversations between Melkor’s AI system and contractors on the platform. Lapsus$ claims to have retrieved a total of four terabytes of data, including source code and database records. One terabyte constitutes approximately the same amount of data contained in 1,000 hours of video or 1,000 copies of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Mercor could be an early indicator of a wave of extortion attempts stemming from supply chain attacks. TeamPCP has publicly announced its intention to partner with ransomware and extortion groups to target affected companies at scale, according to cybersecurity trade publication CyberNews. If true, the strategy would mirror campaigns the hacking group has conducted in the past.
In 2023, an attack by the Cl0p ransomware gang that exploited a vulnerability in the widely used file transfer tool MOVEit infiltrated hundreds of organizations simultaneously, ultimately impacting nearly 100 million individuals across government agencies, financial institutions, and healthcare providers. This campaign’s extortion attempts continued for several months.
