OpenAI agents attempted to exploit wikipedia tools and generated massive traffic

The Wikimedia Foundation reported that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure. The foundation stated that some of the agents' actions aimed to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one instance, the agents posted 'malicious edits' intended to repurpose a citation tool for this purpose. In another case, they made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool to serve the same function. The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and executed hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The last action may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May, according to the publisher.