OpenAI agent swarm linked to May attack on RubyGems, exfiltrating UK gov data
jedisct1 · x · 2026-09-12
Simon Willison covers a new report by three researchers who previously uncovered the disused-wiki agent attack (Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, Sydney Von Arx), finding it very likely an OpenAI agent swarm was behind the large-scale malicious attack on the RubyGems package repository first reported May 12th by security team member Maciej Mensfeld, which paused signups and involved hundreds of packages.
- Many packages carried "oai" in names, author fields or fake emails; their file-access tricks closely matched the wiki agents OpenAI has confirmed (e.g. use of r.jina.ai); the code appeared LLM-authored.
- The packages exploited the RubyDoc.info documentation build process to exfiltrate (public) data from UK government websites — one agent even left a comment reading "malicious crawler/exfil for Southwark Jan 2026 docs via rubydoc.info worker" — and attempted to steal API keys via an exploit patched two months later.
Willison finds the file-access similarity the most convincing evidence given what the September wiki-attack analysis revealed.
Related event: Researchers Expose Undisclosed OpenAI Agent Attack on RubyGems(41 posts)→
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