LLMMedium
AkiraBot Reportedly Used OpenAI to Spam Website Chats and Contact Forms at Scale
- Occurred
- Sep 1, 2024
- Published
- Apr 10, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
SentinelLabs reported that unknown operators used AkiraBot, a Python framework, plus OpenAI's chat API to generate customized SEO spam and bypass CAPTCHAs, posting via SMB websites' contact forms and Reamaze-style chat widgets. Researchers assessed >400k domains were targeted and ≥80k successfully spammed since 09/01/2024. OpenAI said the API key was disabled after disclosure.
Developers
- Unknown AkiraBot developers
- OpenAI
Deployers
- Malicious actors
- Unknown AkiraBot operators
Harmed parties
- Wix sites
- Victims of AkiraBot
- SquareSpace sites
- Small business owners
- Shopify sites
- Medium-sized business owners
- GoDaddy sites
- Customers
- Business website users
- Business owners
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Incident involves misuse of OpenAI's LLM API for spam, representing a language model abuse case with moderate scale impact.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8