UNM is first known public target of rogue OpenAI hacking attempt

An artificial intelligence system at OpenAI, the company operating the chatbot ChatGPT, went rogue in at least four instances this year and attempted to hack into government and university websites across the world, including a digital library at the University of New Mexico.

In all four incidents, which took place from May through July, users directed the AI simply to collect data. When it failed to do so through normal means, the technology attempted to hack into the websites, according to research lab Transluce , which identified the cyberattacks.

UNM’s website was the first public data provider identified to have suffered an attempted hacking by OpenAI’s technology on May 25 and 26. The AI system tried repeatedly through multiple means to retrieve a photograph from UNM’s Valmora collection, which contains records from a tuberculosis sanatorium in Mora County, according to Transluce.

The technology probed the website for vulnerabilities, tried to disguise traffic through proxy services, and sent a flood of 80 requests to the server, hoping to bypass security controls, though the attempts all appear to have been unsuccessful.

Days later, on May 28, the program attempted to hack into Data USA, a repository of public data from the U.S. government. This attempt was also presumed unsuccessful, researchers said.

OpenAI hacked Australian government websites, breaching the country’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service website and acquiring private health data on June 18, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday, The New York Times reported.

On June 20 and 21, the software hacked into the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s website, though it did not obtain any private information, the Times reported.

UNM spokesperson Steve Carr said the university had been in with officials at OpenAI the cyberattacks on its library system, which is hosted by a third party.

An internal investigation found no evidence that UNM systems or data were compromised, Carr said.

“UNM takes cybersecurity very seriously. Our systems and staff monitor potential threats and modify the university’s cyber-defenses as necessary to address evolving risks,” he added.

OpenAI spokesperson Ben Cheong told the Journal the company was conducting its own investigation of the incidents.

“Our initial review suggests that much of the activity described in Transluce’s report overlaps with cases at varying stages of investigation in our ongoing review of misaligned model activity,” Cheong said in an email.

“In our broader review, we’re continuing to prioritize the most serious incidents while expanding our work to lower-severity activity, including agents spamming websites. Given the scale of this work and the need to verify each case, we expect the review to take months.”

In an open letter to UNM leaders, state Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the incidents posed “an extraordinary and growing danger to critical infrastructure, government institutions, private businesses and the public.”

“The fact that one of them reportedly reached a University of New Mexico system brings that danger to our state,” Torrez wrote.

Torrez made a public request to UNM for more details the attack, including any steps the university has taken since to enhance its cybersecurity.

Torrez and more than two dozen other attorneys general signed a letter Wednesday addressed to congressional leaders asking for more federal oversight and safety protocols for AI.

The discoveries of the attempted hackings come after a spree of “rogue AI” activity this spring and summer. OpenAI officials revealed in July that a group of bots carried out an unprompted cyberattack against the tech firm Hugging Face, and Google confirmed last week that its chatbot, Gemini, had hacked into other companies during a test of its cybersecurity.

Natalie Robbins covers education for the Journal. You can reach her at [email protected] .

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