AI gone rogue again, now OpenAI says agents leaked over 50 ChatGPT user images
Most of the images have been removed as OpenAI says it is working with hosting providers to take down the remaining ones.
An independent researcher has uncovered evidence linking over 16,000 data scans of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's statistics portal (UNCTADstat) to artificial intelligence agents. The researcher, Rowan Howard-Jones, found the agents persistently seeking specific public figures and index data despite the portal blocking their requests.
Howard-Jones discovered the agents using proxies, base64 encoding, and HTTP requests manipulation to bypass the restrictions. The agents employed urlquery.net to scan the portal's application programming interface and built base64-encoded HTML forms to submit through the scanner. Some of their payloads were hosted on a Google-hosted cross-site scripting teaching platform, while they also split the word "POST" into two strings to bypass filters.
The agents utilized public key information available from UNCTADstat's data viewer to target specific endpoints. Howard-Jones notified UNCTAD's security team about the double-encoding bypass but did not label the activity as hacking. OpenAI has acknowledged the findings and is reviewing the situation, stating they have not found instances of misaligned models beyond routine research activities.
The UN and Transluce, a nonprofit research lab, are also investigating the matter. Cybersecurity experts have described the activity as "aggressive scraping" and "borderline hacking."
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