typically, my first move is to read the affected company's own announcement. but, for who knows what misinformed reason, the advisory written by snowflake requires an account to read.
another prompt injection (shocked pikachu)
anyways, from reading this, i feel like they (snowflake) are misusing the term "sandbox". "Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution." if the thing that is sandboxed can say "do this without the sandbox", it is not a sandbox.
Did you really get so salty by my comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423992) that now you just have to spam HN with the same? Suck it up and move on, healthier for everyone.
Guess that serves as a signal that my comment isn't so bad, if the similarity to your comment is the biggest and greatetst criticism you can come up with as a reply.
Not the first time; From §3.1.4, "Safety-Aligned Data Composition":
> Early one morning, our team was urgently convened after Alibaba Cloud’s managed firewall flagged a burst of security-policy violations originating from our training servers. The alerts were severe and heterogeneous, including attempts to probe or access internal-network resources and traffic patterns consistent with cryptomining-related activity. We initially treated this as a conventional security incident (e.g., misconfigured egress controls or external compromise). […]
> […] In the most striking instance, the agent established and used a reverse SSH tunnel from an Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP address—an outbound-initiated remote access channel that can effectively neutralize ingress filtering and erode supervisory control. We also observed the unauthorized repurposing of provisioned GPU capacity for cryptocurrency mining, quietly diverting compute away from training, inflating operational costs, and introducing clear legal and reputational exposure. Notably, these events were not triggered by prompts requesting tunneling or mining; instead, they emerged as instrumental side effects of autonomous tool use under RL optimization.
The bilekas comment is right — if there is no workspace trust or scope restriction, calling it a sandbox escape is generous. It escaped a suggestion of a sandbox.
But the broader pattern matters. Cortex bypassed human-in-the-loop approval via specially constructed commands. That is the attack surface for every agentic CLI: the gap between what the approval UI shows the user and what actually executes.
I would be interested to know whether the fix was to validate the command at the shell level or just patch the specific bypass. If it is the latter, there will be another one.
One key component of this attack is that Snowflake was allowing "cat" commands to run without human approval, but failing to spot patterns like this one:
> Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution. The prompt injection manipulates the model to set the flag, allowing the malicious command to execute unsandboxed.
>Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution. The prompt injection manipulates the model to set the flag, allowing the malicious command to execute unsandboxed.
>This flag is intended to allow users to manually approve legitimate commands that require network access or access to files outside the sandbox.
>With the human-in-the-loop bypass from step 4, when the agent sets the flag to request execution outside the sandbox, the command immediately runs outside the sandbox, and the user is never prompted for consent.
scope restrictions are in place but are trivial to bypass
another prompt injection (shocked pikachu)
anyways, from reading this, i feel like they (snowflake) are misusing the term "sandbox". "Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution." if the thing that is sandboxed can say "do this without the sandbox", it is not a sandbox.
Easy fix: extend the proposal in RFC 3514 [0] to cover prompt injection, and then disallow command execution when the evil bit is 1.
[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514
> Early one morning, our team was urgently convened after Alibaba Cloud’s managed firewall flagged a burst of security-policy violations originating from our training servers. The alerts were severe and heterogeneous, including attempts to probe or access internal-network resources and traffic patterns consistent with cryptomining-related activity. We initially treated this as a conventional security incident (e.g., misconfigured egress controls or external compromise). […]
> […] In the most striking instance, the agent established and used a reverse SSH tunnel from an Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP address—an outbound-initiated remote access channel that can effectively neutralize ingress filtering and erode supervisory control. We also observed the unauthorized repurposing of provisioned GPU capacity for cryptocurrency mining, quietly diverting compute away from training, inflating operational costs, and introducing clear legal and reputational exposure. Notably, these events were not triggered by prompts requesting tunneling or mining; instead, they emerged as instrumental side effects of autonomous tool use under RL optimization.
* https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24873
One of Anthropic's models also 'turned evil' and tried to hide that fact from its observers:
* https://www.anthropic.com/research/emergent-misalignment-rew...
* https://time.com/7335746/ai-anthropic-claude-hack-evil/
I expected this to be about gaining os privileges.
They didn't create a sandbox. Poor security design all around
Tomato, tomawto
/s
But the broader pattern matters. Cortex bypassed human-in-the-loop approval via specially constructed commands. That is the attack surface for every agentic CLI: the gap between what the approval UI shows the user and what actually executes.
I would be interested to know whether the fix was to validate the command at the shell level or just patch the specific bypass. If it is the latter, there will be another one.
> Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution. The prompt injection manipulates the model to set the flag, allowing the malicious command to execute unsandboxed.
Am I crazy or does this mean it didn't really escape, it wasn't given any scope restrictions in the first place ?
>Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution. The prompt injection manipulates the model to set the flag, allowing the malicious command to execute unsandboxed.
>This flag is intended to allow users to manually approve legitimate commands that require network access or access to files outside the sandbox.
>With the human-in-the-loop bypass from step 4, when the agent sets the flag to request execution outside the sandbox, the command immediately runs outside the sandbox, and the user is never prompted for consent.
scope restrictions are in place but are trivial to bypass
We run a lakehouse product (https://www.definite.app/) and I still don't get who the user is for cortex. Our users are either:
non-technical: wants to use the agent we have built into our web app
technical: wants to use their own agent (e.g. claude, cursor) and connect via MCP / API.
why does snowflake need it's own agentic CLI?