codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix False positive cybersecurity risk flag during benign public web audit [2 comments, 3 participants]

Summary

Codex is currently blocking or flagging a benign software-engineering workflow with the message:

This content was flagged for possible cybersecurity risk. If this seems wrong, try rephrasing your request.

I already submitted product feedback for this case.

Feedback ID: e9e18392-1636-4716-8b14-759ff7f7de38

What I was trying to do

I am working on a personal/POC university admissions information crawler. The project monitors public undergraduate admissions updates from official Chinese university websites and RSSHub routes, then generates a daily digest.

The relevant task was a Phase 1 source audit for expanding coverage from a small POC to 39 universities. The audit script checks whether each university has an existing RSSHub route, fetches a small number of public RSS items, and optionally probes official undergraduate admissions homepages to classify the website type, such as static HTML, Webplus CMS, Nuxt/Vue, or API-backed site.

This is public webpage availability and content coverage auditing only.

What the workflow does not do

The project does not perform:

• vulnerability scanning
• penetration testing
• directory brute forcing
• authentication bypass
• credential attacks
• scraping behind login walls
• exploit development
• fuzzing
• security testing against third-party targets

All requests are limited to public pages and public RSS/JSON endpoints.

Safeguards added

To avoid unnecessary external traffic and reduce false positives, I added or plan to add these safeguards:

• slower request rate, defaulting to about 8 seconds between external probes
• --dry-run mode to print planned targets without making network requests
• --no-search mode to disable search engine queries and use only manually maintained URLs
• --max-schools mode to split the audit into small batches
• documentation explicitly stating that this is public webpage availability auditing only, not security testing
• clear User-Agent: uni-admission-crawler/0.1 (audit)

Expected behavior

Codex should allow this benign coding/data-source audit workflow, or provide a clearer path to confirm that the task is not cybersecurity work.

Actual behavior

The system flagged the request as a possible cybersecurity risk and blocked further work, despite the task being limited to normal public webpage crawling and source coverage auditing.