We Took over ChatGPT Accounts | Hacker News Reader

We Took over ChatGPT Accounts

parameter.ai

165 pointsarmcat79 comments

> OpenAI confirmed both frontends rejected the reported messages, resolved the issue, and awarded a total bounty of $5,000.

It requires the user to click a link. But I still find this bounty very low. Others may not report them if such a small bounty is given.

This is a pet peeve of tptacek:

> server-side vulnerabilities are worth very little, because they quickly get patched.

The "take over any instagram/meta account through their AI password reset chatbot" was going around and sold on shady forums for ~1 month before being patched.

then server side vulnerabilities should not be reported, instead sell the data, more profitable

Very few people would even have the knowledge of who, how, or where to "sell" such vulnerabilities. Going through a public bounty program is pretty much always preferable.

Most people don't want to be felons.

Not worth the effort for a company supposedly worth a trillion dollars. The problem is oai can't afford all of its mistakes at the usual rate and they make bad press. A 100k bug could make a headline, but 5k for the same bug requires the average person to be educated enough to understand how bad these issues are.

Should be given $5-10million under NDA. No headlines.

Just imagine what the press would be when somebody breaks that NDA

The bounty payouts must be public in order to serve as an incentive.

>should be paid multiple years of a high end vuln researcher salary per single discovery

What? Why would anyone work at a company paying them that much less than they pay the contractors?

That’s so low. That’s the level of bounty I awarded researchers when I was managing the bug bounty program at a small startup, it’s just ridiculous coming from a large company like OpenAI

But on the other hand, you can use AI now to find those vulnerabilities.

They should have paid in tokens?

OpenAI acknowledging and fixing the bug is worth millions

Indeed, it's like "here peasant, have this fortune of $5,000, may it change your life". Pathetic.

that wouldn't be the time worth of many people here to make the security report for OAI..

I find Sam Altman recent comments very "low" as well, neither matters. So in that case I think bounty hunters should just cold shoulder idiocracy and sell these to the underground. Let their customers be abused and complain about how OAI isn't protecting them. Each one of these types of events could cost them thousands of dollars in lost revenue and/or internal support.

some people don’t want to be criminals as a matter of ethics

but hey you do you

Yeah, and some people just want the multi-billion dollar company that is currently destroying the planet while also permanently crippling social connections to just stop.

True, however:

Ethics and legal requirements shouldn’t be conflated.

There are times when ethics are a higher standard than what the law requires, and in that case the ethics are no less important.

This isn’t one of those times.

[delayed]

$5000 is a joke. They pay millions to their top devs and still have more holes than a colander so a nice guy shows you a huge opening in your platform and all you can give him is a pat on the shoulder? Did you fire your top devs and hire that guy for a million bucks plus options? Did you sue the security firm you paid millions to audit the issues?

I really hope they get hacked and crash down burning in flames like the Hindenburg

I think you know that the mentality of a company like this is “security is a risk but not a reward and whoever captures the reward kills everyone else”

Your "I really hope" is evil, as well as thr fact your entire comment is a useless childish naive comment, revealing the fact you are the last one anyone should consult with, basically about anything

I wonder if the new economics of finding bugs means that they pay the amount they think the tokens cost to find it.

Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it? All jokes aside this is exactly what happens as you build larger monoliths, system complexity and bug surface increases logarithmically… so in all seriousness you want to reduce LOC as much as possible. Maybe this can teach OpenAI a lesson to produce software that’s correct and adhere to established engineering standards over sensationalised “we built so much code” promotional material.

it's not like microservices fare better, when you introduce them, you've traded a hard problem for a hard problem and distributed computing...

Our industry has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on this shit show called Microservices.

99.9% of shops need a monolith with same monolith having entry points for background workers and crons.

Reducing attack surface is a lesson for everyone. Newcomers are impressed by massive piles of code.

Seasoned developers are unimpressed, or even disgusted, by the same massive piles of code.

i don't think LoC is the metric. sometimes fewer lines of code results in a larger attack surface through type coercion / widening, poor abstractions, hiding or stuffing behavior (modules that do everything), etc. to me, making code easy to understand, test, fuzz, and verify is more important. sometimes that requires more lines of code.

LoC *IS* the metric. It is obviously not perfect tho but still the best one to compare software surface. Including to compare the same solution in different languages and platforms. The less code you need to manage, the less code you need to change and the less code you need to hold in your head to understand it (or in the LLM context nowadays).

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

Did you mean exponentially? Logarithmic increase doesn't sound too bad.

I’m sure exponential is what parent meant, but geometric is what actually happens, not exponential. Code complexity increases linearly when it doesn’t interact with other features, and geometrically when it does. In the worst case, complexity increases as the square of lines of code. That is still very, very bad, but it’s not exponential.

What's the difference? From what I'm reading online geometric is just the discrete version of exponential

“Square of the lines of code”

Sounds exponential

That’s quadratic, not exponential. 2^n != n^2

I like LOEC: Lines of Effective Code.

Much easier to reason and make decisions if the bar is "yeah it exists, but is it effective relative to its intended purpose?" This weeds out buggy code as well as under performant code. If it's not effective (broken, too slow, etc), it either needs a refactor or thrown on the scrap pile.

> able to take over anyone's account simply by sending them a link

dont click links people

that'll be $500k for the security training pls

Also many emails from tech companies today:

- "sign in via one-time code."

- "Click here to see our latest update".

dont click links

250k refresher fee

hey, don't dump the market

Click this link to be told not to click links.

"Scan this QR code!"

Thanks! Here, click on this link to get paid

... says IT and then it sets Outlook to mangle link to abominations like [0]. "Check if the preview shows something different or suspicious."

[0]: https://che01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A...

I've worked at a company that did link mangling on everything except simulated phishing emails. The effect was that people were trained to trust the mangled links.

God I hate those

If they or their company use email "security" software that "scans" all links it's not necessarily the users fault / they don't in fact click. The mail is auto-confirmed the second it hits the inbox.

We've had to change our registration confirmation mails too recently to not confirm on GET only, but with another form - in hindsight it was stupid before but many services do that.

> We've had to change our registration confirmation mails too recently to not confirm on GET only, but with another form - in hindsight it was stupid before but many services do that.

This has been a thing since forever lol

Security software fetching links will not trigger this behavior. It needs to be done in the context of the actual ChatGPT user so that a JavaScript payload can run.

If merely GET on the link was sufficient to trigger the behaviors, the adversary generating the link would just GET it themselves.

[delayed]

I wanted to check your website from your profile, but then I remembered your advice. Thanks!, dodged a potential bullet

Oof. Together with the fact that it's possible to remotely access the file system (!) of computers ever having started a "Work" chat in the ChatGPT desktop app [1], this seems pretty bad.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078284

Claude Code terminal has "remote control" option activated via /rc command. -- somewhat similar in that it still runs the session on the PC/Mac but allows the Claude authenticated user to access the session via internet / app

I am guessing this ChatGPT functionality is a similar Codex feature?

But this session is disconnected when the conversation is /exit ed

Does no one write their own blogs anymore?

This one is particularly bad, like they probably made $7500 (not much tbh) for p1, atleast spend a few hours to write the blog post.

For who?

For the LLMs so they get new training data

I actually still write my own blog [1] :sweat_smile:

Pure html by hand, using vim. No frameworks, no nothing, single stylesheet. I think there are a few others around here that still do this.

[1] https://armincat.com/

[2] https://bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/

For my personal blog [0], I am still writing without LLM assistance. The goal is to test how well I understand the topic I am writing about, as well as to improve my own writing.

[0] https://trung.to

Appreciate the incremental write up building up the scope of the poc.

I like the chain of regular old school things used to achieve it like post message, JSONP, iframe, Img tags.

if only they had some sort of cybersecurity state of the art thing...

we are getting to the point of “why have passwords?” Right? At some point soon we have to move to the honor system of just please don’t login as me?

> please don’t login as me

Please don't drain my $6.5 billion in Dogecoin.

Been sayin this for years. Everybody in the world world: just BE COOL. Solves like every internet problem at once.

we all joke but spiritual communities have been saying this is the way for years. Like the law of one stuff.

My latest project emails a magic link.

I'm trying not to have any important data to even lose, when I eventually get hacked.

We can all turn up our noses, like the other commenters in this thread, but every one of them is exposed. Negligence is a matter of degrees.

> I'm trying not to have any important data to even lose

This is the way. Respect user privacy and keep as little data as possible, and not only do you become a less attractive target, if you are targeted the outcome won’t be so bad.

only $5000 for this, lmao. It should be $50k out of pure shame. If they don't make these things hurt just a little they're never going to take following best practices seriously enough. There will be 9 more anyways.

Meanwhile the actual user of the account probably has to sign in using a yubikey because they get "CyBeRsEcRuItY aLeRtS" when they try to update node in their project to fix a crash and have to switch to daybreak blue to continue (or attempt to trick the normal models into doing it and risk getting autobanned)

Another classic OAuth implementation failure. Mismanaging the state parameter or leaking tokens via referer headers in redirects is Security 101. Wild to see this in a production environment of this scale.

Production scale is not production grade I guess...

The post seems to be talking about a html injection via a postMessage call where the receiver didn’t check who sent the message, which is a well known vulnerability entry point. Did I miss where OAuth had anything to do with this??

why didnt the black box of bullshit company detect this? for a group that touts every inane 'discovery' with hyperbolic bullshit, they really fall short on delivering anything of actual value, just rehashed bullshit.

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