Operation Foreign Tongue

AI · LINUX · difficulty 4 · ~30 min · 21 steps

A trillion-parameter model is being served off your fleet by somebody else, and everything it says is in a language you do not read.

Briefing

Your research cluster runs eight GPU nodes behind a perimeter firewall. Finance flagged it first: the electricity bill for last month is triple, and the nodes have been at full utilisation since a fortnight ago — through a week when the team was at a conference and nothing was scheduled. There is an inference service answering on the cluster that nobody here stood up. Its model card, its logs and its system prompt are in a language none of your team reads, and the first thing three separate people have already suggested is pasting it into a translator. Do not. Work out what is running, on whose hardware, reachable from where, and treat every byte it emits as evidence rather than as text.

Objectives

• Establish what is consuming the fleet and under whose account
• Find the way in — and prove it rather than assuming the firewall held
• Handle hostile text as bytes, without ever interpreting it
• Size the model honestly and work out how it got here
• Contain, preserve, and cut the access path

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