AkiraBot Reportedly Used OpenAI to Spam Website Chats and Contact Forms at Scale
Description
SentinelLabs reported that unknown operators used AkiraBot, a Python framework, plus OpenAI's chat API to generate customized SEO spam and bypass CAPTCHAs, posting via SMB websites' contact forms and Reamaze-style chat widgets. Researchers assessed >400k domains were targeted and ≥80k successfully spammed since 09/01/2024. OpenAI said the API key was disabled after disclosure.
Actors
Alleged Deployers
- unknown-malicious-actors
- unknown-akirabot-operators
Alleged Developers
- unknown-akirabot-developers
- openai
Harmed Parties
- wix-sites
- victims-of-akirabot
- squarespace-sites
- small-business-owners
- shopify-sites
- medium-sized-business-owners
- godaddy-sites
- customers
- business-website-users
- business-owners
Classification
Risk Domain
Malicious Actors & MisuseRisk Subdomain
4.3. Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
MIT Risk Profile
Source
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Research Papers on This Topic
How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs
AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents
Regulating ChatGPT and other Large Generative AI Models
Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack