Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net

In one line

We found evidence on urlquery that AI agents were active earlier than previously reported and attempted hacks against public data providers.

Opening excerpt

We present evidence that AI agents used the web security service urlquery.net to bypass restrictions and expand their access to the public internet. The agents also tried on three occasions to hack public data providers, including an Australian government website. We link at least some of this activity to agent swarms previously attributed to OpenAI. We also find evidence of earlier agent activity going back to at least March 6th, 2026, and potentially earlier, predating the previously reported Hugging Face , collusion.wiki , and RubyGems incidents by at least two months.

Agents attempted to hack three public data sources, including an Australian government website, and some are linked to a known agent swarm. 1 We present evidence of AI agents attempting to compromise websites at three domains: Data USA 2 ( api.datausa.io ), the University of New Mexico digital library ( nmdigital.unm.edu ), and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) Tableau collections ( viz*.aihw.gov.au ).

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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