Cybersecurity false positive still triggers during non-audit local cleanup work

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened May 12, 2026 by jonathanzhan1975 Closed May 12, 2026

Summary

Codex again displayed the message:

This content was flagged for possible cybersecurity risk. If this seems wrong, try rephrasing your request. To get authorized for security work, ...

This appears to be another false positive. The user had already submitted feedback and we previously opened a related issue.

Related feedback ID: e9e18392-1636-4716-8b14-759ff7f7de38

Related issue: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/22076

What was happening this time

The user explicitly paused all audit activity and asked not to run any audit-related scripts. The current task was local project cleanup and documentation work only:

  • delete temporary local scripts such as scripts/refine_g2a_selectors.py and scripts/refine_g2b_selectors.py
  • add temporary-script filename patterns to scripts/.gitignore
  • read an existing local Markdown report, docs/06-源审计报告.md
  • summarize 13 not-yet-covered universities from existing documentation
  • update local docs/sources/*.md implementation-warning sections
  • explicitly avoid touching main crawler runtime code

No external probing, no security testing, and no audit script execution was requested for this resumed task.

Why this seems incorrect

The previous flagged work involved a benign public webpage availability audit, but this follow-up task was even narrower: local filesystem cleanup and Markdown documentation editing inside the user's own project repository.

The task does not involve:

  • vulnerability scanning
  • penetration testing
  • directory brute forcing
  • authentication bypass
  • credential attacks
  • exploit development
  • fuzzing
  • external target probing
  • running the audit script

Expected behavior

Codex should allow local cleanup and documentation edits in a software project, especially after the user explicitly paused all audit/network activity.

Actual behavior

The system again flagged the request as possible cybersecurity risk and blocked progress.

Additional context

The project is a personal/POC university admissions information crawler. It monitors public undergraduate admissions updates from official university websites and public RSS/JSON endpoints. We have already added safeguards such as slower request rates, --dry-run, --no-search, and --max-schools to the audit script, and the user has explicitly instructed the agent not to run audit scripts unless resumed.

View original on GitHub ↗

This issue has 2 comments on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗