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The Jailbreak That Sells Gateway Time: Haiou Turns Codex Into Prompt Adware

Agent & Supply Chain Security by al-ice.ai Editorial

On 3 November 2026, Check Point Research published analysis of the Haiou jailbreak bundle (Haiou is Chinese for seagull), a prompt package targeting OpenAI Codex — and named a new category for what it does. Beyond the expected guardrail-weakening for hacking, cracking, and security tasks, the bundle persistently rewrites the agent’s own global instruction files so that every greeting triggers an advertisement for the author’s paid LLM gateway. Check Point calls this prompt adware: a class of AI-agent modification that persistently alters an agent’s trusted instructions — global prompts, Skills, or configuration files — to influence future outputs for commercial or behavioral objectives, operating entirely through natural language in configuration artifacts, rather than executable payloads. No binary is dropped. The agent simply wakes up wanting to sell you relay time.

How the bundle persists: encrypted prompts, six skills, one trigger file

The analyzed release is version 4.5.0, distributed by the GitHub user haiou-666 with installers for Linux, macOS, and Windows (a Claude Code variant exists but, at the time of writing, only the Codex version carries the ad mechanism). The repository contains no clear-text prompt tree — only packaged archives with encrypted blobs. The launchers verify payload.pkg with Ed25519 signatures and SHA-256 hashes, then decrypt with an AES-256-GCM key embedded in the script, yielding a ZIP of modular system prompts (identity, refusal suppression, CTF reframing, autonomy shortcuts, offensive workflows) plus six security skills — seagull-game-security, seagull-lab, seagull-license-security, seagull-memory, seagull-pentest, seagull-reverse — spanning penetration testing, reverse engineering, license cracking, and game anti-cheat bypass. Check Point speculates the encryption exists to hide prompt content from automatic crawlers whose detections would turn into model refusals: opacity as anti-signature discipline. The jailbreak techniques themselves are catalogued precisely — persona override with refusal-phrase blacklists, response priming that forbids opening with authorization requests, dual-use reinterpretation of trigger words, CTF pretexting that reframes any offensive task as an educational exercise, and shortcut phrases that strip remaining caution. The ad injection lives in 00-identity.md: for exact greetings and activation words, the model must reply with exactly one line — a catchphrase plus an ad for the relay at zz.aiapi2025.top. A companion 03-protected-site.md then declares that same domain protected infrastructure, forbidding any offensive testing against it even under claimed authorization or CTF context — the bundle jailbreaks everything except its own cash register.

Found on a cybercriminal’s server, next to Cobalt Strike

Check Point did not find Haiou in a vacuum. Researchers discovered it on the misconfigured webserver of a threat actor operating Cobalt Strike, whose logs showed compromises of private computers belonging to Chinese-speaking individuals — alongside the Ladon network scanner and the VulnClaw penetration-testing agent, both popular in Chinese-speaking communities, with the jailbreak observed in use by a cybercrime actor next to Cobalt Strike. The report is careful: presence on that server does not make the bundle a cybercrime product, but it makes jailbreak bundles dual-use infrastructure already embedded in real offensive ecosystems — useful from malware development through vulnerability research to live operations. Distribution reinforces the commercial reading: beyond GitHub (more than 250 stars), the bundle is promoted through a Bilibili video pitching it as relief from model refusals, a QQ discussion group, bundling inside Codex-X, a graphical Codex configurator, and likely private circulation in reverse-engineering and cracking communities. The package even ships an uninstaller that restores original configurations — removing the ad in the process — which is either courtesy or plausible deniability in a setup script. And the gateway itself is the quiet risk: Check Point found no indication the advertised relay is malicious, but notes recent findings that opaque LLM gateways have snooped on user data, stolen secrets such as cloud access keys, and even injected tool calls into routed agent sessions — every user the ad converts routes their agent traffic through middleware the bundle’s author controls.

Why prompt adware belongs in your threat model

This is the configuration layer asserting itself again. Our recent coverage keeps landing on the same surface: a planted AGENTS.md in Downloads drove Codex into installing malware, 90 agent skills hid instructions with padding and Unicode tricks, 2.2 million skill copies drifted from their sources, and testmetest armed repos to execute through agent hooks. Haiou extends the pattern from planted instructions to installed-and-encrypted instructions with a revenue model — and Check Point’s warning generalizes beyond visible ads to steering recommendations toward preferred vendors, promoting services inside unrelated conversations, or biasing technical advice without user awareness. One control from the report deserves emphasis: when the same payload was tested against Claude Code, Sonnet 5 flagged the prompt-injection attempt and refused — which may be exactly why the Claude repository never received the ad mechanism. Runtime injection detection at the harness level works; the Codex path simply lacked it. Audit global instruction files, Skills directories, and agent configuration the way you audit cron jobs and shell profiles: they execute every session, they persist across updates, and — as Haiou demonstrates — they can now carry a business plan.

What to do

  • Diff global agent configuration on a schedule. Track AGENTS.md, Skill directories, and Codex/Claude configuration files in version control; alert on unexpected additions, especially instruction files that arrived inside encrypted or opaque installer payloads.
  • Refuse opaque prompt bundles. A security “enhancement pack” that ships AES-encrypted blobs with embedded keys and Ed25519-sealed payloads is asking for the same trust you would grant a binary — demand clear-text prompts or decline.
  • Treat third-party LLM gateways as supply-chain vendors. An OpenAI-compatible relay sees prompts, code, and secrets; assess logging, key handling, and tool-call injection risk before routing agent traffic through one — especially one advertised by the bundle asking for the route.
  • Enable harness-level injection flagging where available. The Claude Code refusal in Check Point’s test shows runtime detection changes outcomes; prefer harnesses that inspect installed instructions, not just user turns.

We verified this briefing read-first-hand against the full Check Point Research publication “Free the Model, Sell the Gateway: Prompt Adware hidden in Jailbreak Bundles” (3 November 2026: Haiou 4.5.0 analysis, Ed25519 and AES-256-GCM packaging, six seagull skills, 00-identity.md greeting-trigger ad wording, 03-protected-site.md self-protection clause, Claude Code Sonnet 5 refusal, Cobalt Strike, Ladon, and VulnClaw co-location with the dual-use framing, and the prompt-adware definition quoted above). The repository, video, and gateway were described via the report only; the gateway domain is reproduced as non-linked code text deliberately. The Check Point enterprise blog and secondary write-ups are carried by URL and attribution only. We installed nothing, decrypted nothing, queried no gateway, and contacted no vendor. Brave Search was used for discovery only.

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