Imposter abused trust in OpenAI, Anthropic, and 30 others to hunt for secrets

Publisher excerpt From CSO Online

Attackers are impersonating AI agents from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta in a bid to trick organizations into exposing sensitive credentials, according to researchers who observed a single threat actor cycling through dozens of fake bot identities while probing enterprise web servers for secrets. A single threat actor was seen posing as approximately 32 AI bots, while probing organizations across multiple industries. Sought files included those used to store passwords, API keys, and cloud credentials. A malicious scanner used by the attacker ran from an unnamed major cloud provider. “It ignores web pages and requests files that commonly store secrets, including .env configuration files, cloud credential files, private SSH keys, and server environment data, working from a list of roughly 90 file paths,” Cequence’s director of threat research, Will Glazier, said in a blog post. Collin Hogue-Spears, senior director of solution management at Black Duck, who reviewed Cequence’s findings, points out that the scanner tested whether websites treated an AI bot’s self-declared name as proof of its identity. “The user-agent header is where a visitor names itself, and setting it costs nothing,” he said. Glazier said defending against such impersonation requires verifying every claimed identity before trusting it. While Cequence confirmed observing extensive scanning activity attributed to a single threat actor, it did not report a breach. “On one day in October, t…

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