AkiraBot Reportedly Used OpenAI to Spam Website Chats and Contact Forms at Scale

September 1, 2024

SentinelLabs uncovered an incident where unidentified actors exploited AkiraBot, a Python framework, alongside OpenAI's chat API to create customized SEO spam. The spam bypassed CAPTCHAs and was posted on SMB websites' contact forms and Reamaze-style chat widgets, potentially targeting over 400k domains with approximately 80k successful instances since 09/01/2024. OpenAI responded promptly by disabling the associated API key.

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Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.608, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.596, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.596, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown-malicious-actors, unknown-akirabot-operators
Alleged developer: unknown-akirabot-developers, openai
Alleged 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

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1365

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.