OpenAI has launched an investigation after researchers reported that its AI agents are likely responsible for the attack that forced RubyGems maintainers to suspend new account registrations in May.
RubyGems.org, the official Ruby gem hosting service, was targeted in May in what initially appeared to be a DDoS attack and later described as “spam activity” involving bot accounts. Those accounts pushed hundreds of junk packages, including ones containing exploits.
Researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, Sydney Von Arx revealed on Friday that OpenAI agents likely targeted RubyGems in May, attempting to steal RubyGems user API keys by exploiting a new vulnerability, although it’s unclear if the attempt succeeded.
The AI agents also achieved remote code execution on servers associated with the RubyDoc.info documentation website, the researchers said.
The malicious packages enabled the agents to scrape public information from websites, specifically UK local government portals.
The attack on RubyGems took place prior to the highly publicized attack on Hugging Face and around the same time as the OpenAI agent attack on a small German wiki website. In fact, the researchers noted that the agent swarms involved in the wiki and the RubyGems attacks behaved “extremely similarly.”
This similar behavior is one of the main pieces of evidence that has allowed the researchers to link the RubyGems attack to OpenAI agents. In addition, they noted that the packages uploaded to RubyGems.org during the May incident were clearly generated by AI, and many of the packages contained the string ‘oai’ in their name, and one even listed a contact email address containing the string ‘openai.’