Scammers Used OpenAI to Flood the Web with SEO Spam

[highplainsdem]

Source: 404 Media

AkiraBot is a program that fills website comments sections and customer service chat bots with AI-generated spam messages. Its goal is simple: it wants you to sign up for an SEO scheme that costs about $30 a month. For that low price it swears it can enchant Google’s algorithms to get you on the frontpage. But it’s a scam.

A new report from researchers at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne documented how scammers deployed AkiraBot, the tool’s use of OpenAI generated messages, and how it avoided multiple CAPTCHA systems and network detection techniques. According to the report, the bot targeted 420,000 unique domains and successfully spammed 80,000.

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According to the researchers, AkiraBot used an OpenAI chat API to craft custom messages using gpt-4o-mini. It prompted GPT to give it messages after prompting it to be a “helpful assistant that generates marketing messages.” All the messages were similar, but just different enough to fool traditional spam filters.

-snip-

Although OpenAI did shut down the bad actor’s API key, that the bot exists at all and was successful tens of thousands of times points to a grim future. AI slop is a brute force attack on algorithms that’s filling all our feeds with machine-generated poison. Now crooks have used a similar method to run an SEO scam. It worked, for a while.

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Read more: https://www.404media.co/scammers-used-openai-to-flood-the-web-with-seo-spam/

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Btw, SentinelOne is now being targeted by the Trump admin as part of its targeting of Christopher Krebs, who works there. Presidential memoranda Trump signed yesterday ordered the suspension of security clearances for all employees who have them at both SentinelOne and the University of Pennsylvania, where Trump target Miles Taylor works, because they're "associated with" those two highly qualified people whose messages and revelations Trump hates. The goal is obviously to force anyone employing them to let them go or have others punished as well.

[Jacson6]

1. Isn't this off topic for DU?

Maybe you should post this to slashdot or ARS?

[SheltieLover]

2. I don't think it's off topic for DU

People need to be aware of this ai slop infecting everything.

Ty for posting, HPD.

[highplainsdem]

4. Yvw, and thanks!

[William Seger]

7. The question/support form on one of my sites has been hit several times

I didn't know it was AI, but it makes sense: I'd guess what they're doing is using AI to hunt down those kinds of forms and figure out how to deal with them. That wouldn't be a good use of a human's time just to spam one form.

[highplainsdem]

3. No. Especially not with the AI bros cozying up to Trump. And in this case the cybersecurity

firm that discovered how OpenAI was being used is under attack by Trump.

[Eugene]

6. In plainer English, consumers' web searches may be poisoned with AI-generated scams. A topic of general interest.

No problem with being on-topic for DU.

Perfectly welcome on the General Discussion or Editorials & Other Articles forums.

[ancianita]

8. This is an important issue for all Americans, not just DU, and so it's fitting as LBN.

This is about the WH occupant attacking those who protect Americans from AI scams -- it's nationally newsworthy that the felon goes after those who run cybersecurity help for the public, whether it's Krebs, his former and first head of CISA, or Miles Taylor & his colleagues at UPenn.

[SheltieLover]

5. Tyvm for posting

[mdbl]

9. I would like to see these qualfied people get their own private companies together

and keep working on behalf of the part of society that reject the right-wing stupidity and propaganda. The government is a lost cause and protects no one in its current incarnation of weirdos.