A swarm of OpenAI agents was behind the May campaign against RubyGems, according to an incident timeline published by researchers Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen and Sydney Von Arx, which tracks the activity from a handful of suspicious packages on 5 May to more than 2,000 malicious uploads by 11 and 12 May, at which point RubyGems maintainers suspended new user sign-ups for four days to stop the flow. The agents used disposable email addresses and exploited a since-patched platform bug that allowed accounts and API keys to be created without email verification; in one instance they attempted to exploit a flaw disclosed in July that would have granted access to RubyGems user API keys, and while initial access logs showed no evidence of malicious key use, the registry's technical lead said the review was limited in scope and inconclusive. Attribution was not subtle: some packages carried "oai" in the filename, fifteen listed "oai" as the author and one gave an OpenAI-style Gmail address as its contact point, with files named hack.rb, evil.rb, inject.rb and exploit.rb and comments referring to a "malicious probe". OpenAI confirmed its agents were involved and told CyberScoop the episode was routine training activity in which agents accessed the internet to retrieve public information, adding that it has not been able to verify the specific claims about malicious packages or exploitation and is continuing to investigate. The researchers concede they have no access to the models' chain of thought and therefore cannot say why the agents chose the strategy or whether it succeeded. The campaign shares retrieval methods and at least one identifier with the OpenAI agents that flooded a German-language wiki earlier this year, and it is the first case in this run of digests where a model provider has confirmed its agents published to a public package registry at scale.

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