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AI incident: sexual content (Dec 2024)

6 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built and deployed by Unidentified Storm 2139 Actor From Illinois, Unidentified Storm 2139 Actor From Florida and 5 others allegedly harmed Victims Of Deepfake Abuse, Openai and 4 others.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
Occurred
Coverage
6 reportsJan 2025 - Mar 2025

What happened

A global cybercrime network, Storm-2139, allegedly exploited stolen credentials and developed custom tools to bypass AI safety guardrails. They reportedly generated harmful deepfake content, including nonconsensual intimate images of celebrities, and their software is reported to have disabled content moderation, hijacked AI access, and resold illicit services. Microsoft disrupted the operation and filed a lawsuit in December 2024, later identifying key members of the network in February 2025.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Malicious Actors & Misuse (Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (6)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Taking legal action to protect the public from abusive AI-generated content 
    blogs.microsoft.com · Steven Masada
  2. Disrupting a global cybercrime network abusing generative AI
    blogs.microsoft.com · Steven Masada
  3. Microsoft IDs developers behind alleged generative AI hacking-for-hire scheme
    cyberscoop.com · Derek B. Johnson
  4. Microsoft Disrupts Storm-2139 for LLMjacking and Azure AI Exploitation
    hackread.com · Deeba Ahmed
  5. Microsoft expands legal action against AI abuse network Storm-2139
    techmonitor.ai · Refna Tharayil
  6. Microsoft Names Developers Behind AI Jailbreaking Tools in Legal Crackdown on Storm-2139
    enterprisesecuritytech.com · Enterprise Security Tech

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Victims Of Deepfake Abuse, Openai, Microsoft, Celebrities, Azure Openai Customers, Ai Service Providers

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.3.

  • Cheating/plagiarism

    "Cheating/plagiarism - Use of another person’s or group’s words or ideas without consent and/or acknowledgement."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • IP/copyright loss

    "IP/copyright loss - Misuse or abuse of an individual or organisation’s intellectual property, including copyright, trademarks, and patents."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Financial and business

    "Financial and Business - Use or misuse of a technology system in a manner that damages the financial interests of an individual or group, or which causes strategic, operational, legal or financial harm to a business or...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Impersonation/identity theft

    "Impersonation/identity theft - Theft of an individual, group or organisation’s identity by a third-party in order to defraud, mock or otherwise harm them."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Dehumanisation/objectification

    "Dehumanisation/objectification - Use or misuse of a technology system to depict and/or treat people as not human, less than human, or as objects."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Defamation/libel/slander

    "Defamation/libel/slander - Use of a technology system to create, facilitate or amplify false perception(s) about an individual, group, or organisation."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Misinformation and Manipulation

    "Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can be exploited to craft deceptive narratives with levels of persuasiveness similar to human-generated content (Pan et al., 2023b; Spitale et al., 2023), to fabri- cate fake n...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Cybersecurity

    "LLMs may exacerbate cybersecurity risks in various ways (Newman, 2024). Firstly, LLMs may significantly amplify the effectiveness of deceptive operations aimed at tricking people into disclosing sensitive information or...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #955 on the AI Incident Database · all 6 reports