Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

> And yea, this kind of thing should be trivially preventable if they cared at all.

Most of the time when someone says something is "trivial" without knowing anything about the internals, it's never trivial.

As someone working close to the b2c side of a business, I can’t count the amount of times I've heard that something should be trivial while it's something we've thought about for years.

If you’re unable to throttle your own outgoing requests you shouldn’t be making any

The technical flaws are quite trivial to spot, if you have the relevant experience:

- urls[] parameter has no size limit

- urls[] parameter is not deduplicated (but their cache is deduplicating, so this security control was there at some point but is ineffective now)

- their requests to same website / DNS / victim IP address rotate through all available Azure IPs, which gives them risk of being blocked by other hosters. They should come from the same IP address. I noticed them changing to other Azure IP ranges several times, most likely because they got blocked/rate limited by Hetzner or other counterparties from which I was playing around with this vulnerabilities.

But if their team is too limited to recognize security risks, there is nothing one can do. Maybe they were occupied last week with the office gossip around the sexual assault lawsuit against Sam Altman. Maybe they still had holidays or there was another, higher-risk security vulnerability.

Having interacted with several bug bounties in the past, it feels OpenAI is not very mature in that regard. Also why do they choose BugCrowd when HackerOne is much better in my experience.

I assume it'll be hard for them to notice because it's all coming from Azure IP ranges. OpenAI has very big credit card behind this Azure account so this vulnerability might only be limited by Azure capacity.

I noticed they switched their crawler to new IP ranges several times, but unfortunately Microsoft CERT / Azure security team didn't answer to my reports.

If this vulnerability is exploited, it hits your server with MANY requests per second, right from the hearts of Azure cloud.

Note I said outgoing, as in the crawlers should be throttling themselves

> rotate through all available Azure IPs, ... They should come from the same IP address.

I would guess that this is intentional, intended to prevent IP level blocks from being effective. That way blocking them means blocking all of Azure. Too much collateral damage to be worth it.

Sorry for misunderstanding your point.

I agree it should be throttled. Maybe they don't need to throttle because they don't care about cost.

Funny thing is that servers from AWS were trying to connect to my system when I played around with this - I assume OpenAI has not moved away from AWS yet.

Also many different security scanners hitting my IP after every burst of incoming requests from the ChatGPT crawler Azure IP ranges. Quite interesting to see that there are some proper network admins out there.

yeah it’s fun out on the wild internet! Thankfully I don’t manage something thing crawlable anymore but even so the endpoint traffic is pretty entertaining sometimes.

What would keep me up at night if I was still more on the ops side is “computer use” AI that’s virtually indistinguishable from a human with a browser. How do you keep the junk away then?

now try to reply to the actual content instead of some generalizing grandstanding bullshit

They need to throttle because otherwise they're simply a DDoS service. It's clear they don't give a fuck though, like any bigtech company. They'll spend millions on prosecuting anyone who dares to do what they perceive as a DoS attack against them, but they'll spit in your face and laugh at you if you even dare to claim they are DDoSing you.

It is. There are scraping third party services you can pay for that will do all of this for you, and getting blocked by IP. You then make your request to the third-party scraper, receive the contents, and do with them whatever you need to do.