Threat actors are forging HTTP User-Agent headers to impersonate popular generative AI assistants while scanning and attacking Russian web applications. According to telemetry from Solar WAF, the first malicious requests appeared on 12 August 2026 under the DeepSeekBot identifier. From 27 August the same technique was observed using the strings ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User, Claude-User and GrokBot.
No traffic carrying these AI-related identifiers was recorded in the monitored dataset during June and July 2026. The attackers exploit the increasing willingness of website owners to treat AI agents as valuable sources of traffic and leads, often granting them more lenient security policies. Because the User-Agent field can be set by any client, it provides no real authentication.
The observed requests were not benign crawling activity. In 53 percent of cases the traffic attempted DNS Rebinding attacks intended to force servers to connect to internal resources. Another 12 percent of requests were linked to data exfiltration attempts, while 4 percent involved Path Traversal to reach files outside permitted directories. The remaining 31 percent comprised other techniques, including traditional SQL injection probes.
Security researchers note that the use of well-known AI brand names is intended to lower the chance of immediate blocking. They expect future campaigns to combine this masquerading method with more advanced evasion tactics that may evade current signature-based detection.
