Teen Uses ChatGPT to Forcefully Unsubscribe 46k Fans from Bandai Channel
When tech giants promised that AI would democratize coding, we didn't realize they meant giving a bored Japanese middle-schooler the ultimate weapon to ruin the weekend for tens of thousands of anime lovers.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrested a 15-year-old middle school student from Tokorozawa for disrupting the operations of Bandai Namco’s anime streaming service.
Instead of writing a complex script from scratch, the young prodigy analyzed the network traffic of the Bandai Channel, spotted a security loophole, and politely asked ChatGPT to write a custom malware script. The AI, apparently eager to help with some light cyber-sabotage, generated code that automatically logged into random accounts and triggered the cancellation of exactly 46,812 active subscriptions.
As the corporate servers started bleeding users, Bandai Namco panicked and tried to block the attacker's IP address. The teenager, displaying the kind of adaptability usually reserved for seasoned threat actors, simply cycled through 30 different IP addresses to keep the automated mass-unsubscription train rolling. The service was forced to shut down entirely for a month, leaving thousands of fans unable to watch their favorite giant robot fights.
During his interrogation, the teen admitted to the cyberattack, explaining that he had no actual grudge against the company but simply wanted to test the limits of his own abilities. He had been teaching himself to code since elementary school, and using an AI chatbot felt like a natural shortcut to see if he could outsmart a multi-million-dollar entertainment conglomerate.
This incident marks the second high-profile arrest of a tech-savvy minor in Japan within a six-month period. Just recently, a 17-year-old from Osaka managed to jailbreak ChatGPT to bypass its security guardrails and harvest personal data belonging to over seven million people.
The corporate dream of safe, neutered artificial intelligence is crashing hard against the reality of bored teenagers with basic programming skills. As long as tech companies leave giant doors unlocked, kids will continue to let AI do the heavy lifting of breaking and entering just for the digital clout.
Source: The Record
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