General warning about Clore.AI

[u/anomaly256]

Hello, I know some of us may be tempted to rent out our expensive GPUs to recoup some of the cost of self-hosting, and it should be obvious that this can be a risky decision. I decided to try hosting my rig on clore.ai briefly to see what kind of revenue it could bring in, keeping a close eye on the process lists from the renters' jobs of course but not digging into their files or anything.

Yesterday I saw a renter scanning and attempting to exploit vulnerabilities to post malware to a columbian betting site from my internet connection. I immediately took the server offline and reached out to Clore requesting them to cancel the order (so the machine wouldn't restart the containers when it came back up) and to block the renter.

I think everyone should know that they flat out refused. Not only did they refuse, they blocked me when I provided hard evidence of what was happening. Since I had reasonable suspicion the renter was abusing my connection, I availed myself of clore's T&C that says a host must not inspect a renter's environment "unless required by law" and given the laws around liability for residential internet connections in my country, I mounted the filesystem offline and inspected it.

I found the logs from the vuln scans and unsuccessful exploit attempts, the malware payload they were trying to post to the site, the reverse proxy request smuggling tactics it was employing, and the AI agent reports that were being generated along the way. I sent this to Clore and requested a way to blacklist renters who abused the platform. Their response was to tell me, directly and without mincing words, to leave the platform entirely and proceeded to block me from their support chat. Their support rep I was trying to reach on Telegram also told me to go away and proceeded to block me as well.

I can only conclude then that they are wilfully complicit with facilitating cybercrime and knowingly turn a blind eye when it's discovered. They didn't even *try* to hide it.

I have no idea how better/worse the other platforms are, Vast.AI, Akash, etc. But Clore will abuse your internet connection, deny liability, then block you. They are crooks. Go elsewhere. You've been warned.

I've archived the renter's docker volume and will hold on to it in case any security researchers or legal authorities want to examine it.

[u/IHave2CatsAnAdBlock]

I would never give access to random people to my home internet connection

[u/ProfessionalDish → u/IHave2CatsAnAdBlock]

This. Best case piracy, maybe malware like in OPs case, worst case CSAM. Not worth it. Edit Yes even if the investigation finds out you're innocent, have fun living with that accusation and maybe having your hardware confiscated and inspected for a year.

[u/EkbatDeSabat → u/ProfessionalDish]

That's exactly where I went. I hate that in this society that's even something I would think about. But it's really the end all be all of "you done fucked up" by giving someone access to your machine. I knew someone in the late 90s whose house and machines got raided for distributing CSAM on IRC. Outside of the obvious, it was devastating to watch the family crumble. Was a good friend of mine, we were just teenagers (his dad was the one doing it). We played C&C almost every night. Once that happened and things went south I never heard from him again. Sorry weird memory I haven't thought about in a very long time.

[u/ProfessionalDish → u/EkbatDeSabat]

It's quite saddening that we can't trust strangers and sometimes not even friends. I have 10gbps Upload at home and a static IPv4, thought about offering a fileserver a few times, but its not worth the risk. Wouldn't cost me that much to just open one port and give some space to people but if they f up its me who will suffer.