Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers

Haha, this would be an amazing way to test the ChatGPT crawler reflective DDOS vulnerability [1] I published last week.

Basically a single HTTP Request to ChatGPT API can trigger 5000 HTTP requests by ChatGPT crawler to a website.

The vulnerability is/was thoroughly ignored by OpenAI/Microsoft/BugCrowd but I really wonder what would happen when ChatGPT crawler interacts with this tarpit several times per second. As ChatGPT crawler is using various Azure IP ranges I actually think the tarpit would crash first.

The vulnerability reporting experience with OpenAI / BugCrowd was really horrific. It's always difficult to get attention for DOS/DDOS vulnerabilities and companies always act like they are not a problem. But if their system goes dark and the CEO calls then suddenly they accept it as a security vulnerability.

I spent a week trying to reach OpenAI/Microsoft to get this fixed, but I gave up and just published the writeup.

I don't recommend you to exploit this vulnerability due to legal reasons.

[1] https://github.com/bf/security-advisories/blob/main/2025-01-...

Nice find, I think one of my sites actually got recently hit by something like this. And yea, this kind of thing should be trivially preventable if they cared at all.

> 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.