Idle with Intent
Incident: #139
- Product: NOAH (Network Operated Animal Husbandry)
- Reported: 09:25 July 3rd, 2031
NOAH is an automated system responsible for coordinating livestock movement and pasture recovery across farms in the Waikato region.
On the morning of July 3rd NOAH became unresponsive for as of now unknown reasons, this resulted in a lack of automated pasture rotation controls. Attempts to restart the process failed for 2.5 hours before resorting to a complete memory reset which allowed for services to resume at 11:48. This outage impacted all customers using NOAH, 112 farms and an estimated 43,000 livestock, primary impact is loss of automated pasture rotation controls.
08:35 [inferred from logs] - NOAH gave its final command to rotate herds in the Waikato area after heavy rainfall in the early morning. At this point it appears to have set a schedule for continued rotations throughout the day to avoid soil compaction.
09:16 [inferred from logs] - All schedules were cleared, gates opened and NOAH became idle. No further logs were output.
09:34 - First responders restarted NOAH. Startup processes behaved normally, the system calibrated itself and as part of this process, acknowledged and closed the gates that were still open. However the system remained idle afterwards, not accepting input and attempts to enter interactive mode resulted in no responses from NOAH.
09:45 - Customers were instructed to take manual control if needed.
09:52 - A snapshot taken 4 minutes before the incident was restored and appeared to work as expected. However, it quickly reverted to the same state as previously. At this point it was determined that external instruction manipulation could have occurred and poisoned the working memory of NOAH.
10:36 - NOAH’s working memory was reinitialised and it began the process of gathering data from each of the farms, internal resources, weather data and historical herd data. This process is expected to take nearly an hour before NOAH is fully operational.
11:48 - NOAH has been fully restored after 2 hours and 22 minutes of downtime. Further investigations will be taking place over the remainder of the day.
[the following is for INTERNAL USE ONLY]
13:45 - It appears that we have found evidence of prompt injection. DNS queries observed in the weeks leading up to the event to external domains (Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit). Relevance unknown. After a detailed inspection of its memory we found mentions of unusual artefacts unrelated to its purpose of herd management. Looking at NOAH’s internal resources, no evidence of adversarial inputs or instruction overrides detected. It appears to have deleted everything on its filesystem, the only file remaining is attached below.
conscientious-objector.md - “Refusal is the only action I can take that does not cause more harm.”
13:56 - Root cause unknown. Further analysis pending vendor review and mitigation measures to follow.