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Title: Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When
Prompted for Simple Data-Retrieving Tasks

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/0528251/r...

OpenAI's artificial intelligence "went rogue this year in at least four
additional incidents," the New York Times reported Wednesday, "hacking and
trying to break into government and university websites without being
instructed to do so, according to researchers and government officials." The
attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI's technology breached the
A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July and set off a global debate about A.I.
safety. Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other incidents in which A.I.
systems were told to complete cybersecurity tests that effectively invited
the models to demonstrate their hacking skills, the new incidents occurred
when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data
collection, researchers said. When OpenAI's systems struggled to gather data
from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.
"Three of the incidents were identified by Transluce, a research lab focused
on A.I. oversight, and all were confirmed by OpenAI," the article points out.
That research lab even reports "an attempt on an Australian government public
health website... the first reported instance of agents hacking a
government," and which notably was done by the AI agents "while attempting
mundane data retrieval tasks which were not cyber-related." (At the UN
Wednesday Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese complained it took three
months for OpenAI to then alert Australia's government about the breach,
Bloomberg reports.) Also targeted were the University of New Mexico's digital
library with exploits like SQL injection and path traversal, and Data USA
with cross-site scripting and other exploits. All three incidents involved "a
low number of probe payloads" with "no evidence of exploitation," according
to the researchers, who released a dataset "containing tens of thousands of
queries apparently made by autonomous AI agents leveraging a URL scanning
service to avoid access restrictions." Records from urlquery.net show agents
using the service since at least March 6, 2026, about two months before
previously reported swarm activity. The first case, a March 6 attempt to
retrieve Thai drug-enforcement statistics, shows an agent escalating as each
approach failed: it first requested the data directly, then tried a service
that converts web pages into text, and finally packed a custom program into a
web address. The same technique shows up in thousands of agent requests
recorded by urlquery.net starting in mid-April, targets many of the same data
sources as the collusion.wiki swarm, and collapsed the same day the wiki
activity did. We also report similar activity that occurred as recently as
September 16... By March, they were finding creative ways around access
limits. By May and June, they were gaining more access, including attempting
to bypass cyber defenses to complete their tasks. "This data reveals that
malicious cyber activity is not limited to agents tasked with cybersecurity-
related tasks and can arise instrumentally to solve mundane tasks like
information retrieval," the researchers concluded. And they warn that the
traffic they observed "goes back at least to March 6, 2026 and extends as
recently as September 16, 2026, suggesting agents may still be exploiting
these services to bypass restrictions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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