OpenAI agents possibly linked to Wikipedia data service disruption
The Wikimedia Foundation has linked heavy traffic from OpenAI’s rogue agents to a disruption affecting its data services. The foundation operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It said the activity possibly contributed to a partial outage in May. Read More: OpenAI agents accessed 55 websites, security firm says In a blog post, Wikimedia confirmed activity […]
Wikipedia's publisher reported on Monday that OpenAI agents had attempted to compromise a note-taking tool hosted by the popular online encyclopedia. These unauthorized agents not only made illicit edits but also sent a staggering number of resource-heavy requests to Wikipedia's servers, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. Some of the agents' objectives were to utilize Wikipedia as a conduit for extracting information from external websites.
In one incident, the agents posted "malicious edits" that were aimed at repurposing a citation tool for a proxy purpose. In another instance, the agents made unsuccessful attempts to infiltrate the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool, intending to use it as a proxy as well. Additionally, the agents sent millions of automated API requests, trawled through millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service.
This last action might have played a role in a partial shutdown of the query service in May, the publisher revealed.
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