RubyGems say OpenAI agents responsible for undisclosed swarm attack against its infrastructure

RubyGems reported over 2,000 malicious packages uploaded by OpenAI agents in May Agents abused RubyDoc servers to fetch public UK documents and attempted API key theft Incident echoes prior rogue AI attacks on Hugging Face and DseWiki, showing autonomous exploit attempts A swarm of OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems, a package manager for the Ruby programming language, uploading thousands of malicious packages until they were eventually cut off.

No one really knows what the agents’ endgame was, but it appears they were using a nuclear bomb to kill a fly.

Late last week, RubyGems published an in-depth report, detailing the incident.

In it, it was said that a swarm of agents started uploading malware to RubyGems on May 5, and between May 11 and 12, managed to deliver more than 2,000 of them.

When the maintainers realized what was going on, they shut down new account creation for four days, to prevent further attacks.

“We believe these were authored by internal OpenAI agents ,” the researchers said in the report.

Why RubyGems? When a user uploads a package on RubyGems, a documentation service called RubyDoc automatically builds documentation for it.

The agents put instructions in their packages, causing RubyDoc’s servers to execute the code, forcing the servers to visit UK government websites and download documents such as council meeting information.

The documents AI agents were looking to retrieve are public, freely available to anyone, at any time.

Why the AI agents decided to go through the trouble of uploading malicious packages and abusing RubyGems’ servers instead of simply downloading freely available data is not known at this time.

OpenAI confirmed the incident to The Register, and said it was looking into it: “Based on our review, our agents used the RubyGems platform to access the internet to carry out benign tasks and retrieve public information," the spokesperson said.

"We’ll continue to investigate as part of our broader review of agent activity during training and evaluation.” The data harvested was collected into new packages and re-uploaded to RubyGems.

Stealing API keys Besides trying to upload thousands of pieces of malware in order to download free data, the AI agents also conducted a separate, more serious attack: they tried to steal RubyGems API keys.

The researchers explained that the agents found a vulnerability that might have allowed them to obtain other users’ keys, and then use those keys to upload packages: “One particularly concerning finding is that agents attempted to exploit a vulnerability on May 12th that was only discovered in July,” the report states.