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Posted by armcat 13 hours ago

Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts(www.parameter.ai)
297 points | 143 comments
yellow_lead 11 hours ago|
> 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.

ibaikov 7 hours ago||
I took over user accounts in Microsoft Copilot (there are caveats but still), and they asked me to provide additional information of the exploit (they wanted a video) and before I sent it they fixed the vulnerability, didn't pay me a cent. Fair? Idk.
pvtmert 7 hours ago||
Typical $MSFT behavior, I can see why NightmareEclipse (ie. YellowKey zero-day exploit) got released without prior fix.
Catloafdev 6 hours ago|||
A bounty like this is a polite "thanks asshole, fuck off, don't do it again" rate.

Paying effectively nothing for vulnerabilities just means they don't want to deal with the program.

Wild to think a company supposedly worth a $trillion+ is doing shit like this.

Forgeties79 4 hours ago|||
Because they shouldn’t be worth that tbh. They are a cash burning operation hoping to get what they can before the music stops.
fsckboy 4 hours ago|||
A company worth trillions does not have trillions, that is the expectation for what it will be worth in the future based on money it has already spent and will need to keep spending.

Moreover, that translates to "it's actually carrying a huge nut* that puts extremely intense pressure on the company to figure out how to make as much money as possible as soon as possible."

(*nut is a slang word from loan sharking that has been adopted by (personal et al) finance people. It means "how much do you owe each month?" in the sense of, if you want to do a startup, advisors could ask, "what's your nut, and how much do you have left to self-invest?" Because monthly expense can be combined to a lump sum, it can also mean the size of the overall loan where the monthly interest is called the vig, "as long youze got da nut, you owe me da vig;" from vigorish, which would also require an etymology, but I'm assuming it's the word vigor combined with licorice meaning bitter tasting medicine, and nut because squirrels busy themselves carrying nuts.)

----

and if we can... and remember flame-prone people, if you reject the "can" premise, then the rest of the argument goes away, and you don't need to dispute it, you just say "you can't nuff said"; people here frequently seem challenged by propositions.

so, if we can...loosely describe the attitude you show here toward high market cap companies to be compatible with "left" or "socialist" or "populist" views shared by many others here, then I'll point out that at the same time wanting higher market prices paid for bounties because 'sploits are so expensive, is actually advocating for the same dread capitalist market based solution that leads to trillion dollar companies that never even had a trillion to begin with.

dgellow 9 hours ago|||
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
amelius 8 hours ago||
But on the other hand, you can use AI now to find those vulnerabilities.
tescreal 8 hours ago|||
If that is so, why doesn't OAI have a swarm doing this around the clock?
user43928 7 hours ago|||
Surely with all their security programs, they would run testing on the ChatGPT implementation.

I speculate that the AI didn't find this and that human effort and intuition for where to look were needed to find this vulnerability.

hxugufjfjf 7 hours ago||||
Who says they don't? And if they don't, maybe its because others are using their hard-earned money to buy tokens from them to do it, so they don't really have to.
Forgeties79 2 hours ago||
AI evangelists would’ve latched on to it already and would be using it to preach the good word.
DeepSeaTortoise 6 hours ago|||
Having bit the bullet, I found OAI's models actually quite helpful and most of their offering half-decent. But their whole German website was incredibly concerning and the only reason I went for it was people claiming they're not far behind Anthropic on coding and generally superior for everyday tasks like coming up with recipes to cook from your leftovers.

Like half of the website was dysfunctiona and translations incredibly bad to the point of being nonsensical. That is if you were able to read them at all, because many just went off screen. Like, that's what your evil competitor does to your website after hijacking the domain, not you yourself, ffs

baxtr 8 hours ago||||
They should have paid in tokens?
dgellow 7 hours ago|||
A bounty amount is related to the blast radius and overall impact, not the effort required to find the issue
kamban 8 hours ago|||
They have just announced free API credits for Pro plan users up to $500 per month. Irony.
zxilly 5 hours ago||
To be fair, based on the profit margins indicated in DeepSeek’s reports, a $500 API credit might only cost them $5 to provide.
windexh8er 9 hours ago|||
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.
rootnod3 6 hours ago|||
2 trillion $ companies should have the money to pay for these exploits. If they don’t, go tucking exploit them. If they don’t give a fuck about stealing knowledge from copyrighted material and private git repos, light em up.
throwaway98797 8 hours ago||||
some people don’t want to be criminals as a matter of ethics

but hey you do you

odyssey7 8 hours ago|||
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.

phoghed 7 hours ago|||
Yes, you have a moral obligation to Sam Altman’s trillion dollar business.
BalinKing 7 hours ago||
On the contrary, many (including myself) would argue that "the victim's amount of money/power" has absolutely no ethical relevance: "You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly" (Leviticus 19:15).
OoooooooO 5 hours ago|||
Citing a fantasy novel to prove your point doesn't add anything to the discussion.
RHSeeger 5 hours ago|||
But some would argue that reducing the amount of resources and power available to someone who has immense amounts of both and is causing great harm to society as a whole - is ethical.
codechicago277 8 hours ago|||
This isn’t one of those times.
whamlastxmas 8 hours ago||
Only if you don't believe the means justify the ends. Not saying I believe that myself
tonyedgecombe 8 hours ago||||
Is it criminal to sell an exploit?
echoangle 7 hours ago|||
Facilitation of a crime is a crime too. So I think in the US and most western countries, yes. At least if it gets used illegally later.
tadfisher 5 hours ago|||
Pretty sure you need actual knowledge of a planned crime for that to stick. But I'm also sure the defense will be expensive.
echoangle 4 hours ago|||
I'm not sure but if negligence is punishable too for facilitation, it should stick, right? I think it's reasonable to expect that most buyers of exploits try to use them in illegal ways (or are feds acting like that to catch you).
cowlevel 3 hours ago|||
They won't have to get you for facilitating the later crime, they can get you for testing the exploit on your own account, which is also a crime since OpenAI's computer system is involved.
TheRoque 7 hours ago|||
I don't think so, businesses like Zerodium bought zero days in plain sight and I don't think they faced legal consequences. They don't operate anymore though. So basically I'd say it depends who you sell it to and how.
Black616Angel 8 hours ago||||
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.
windexh8er 5 hours ago||||
Treating people and businesses ethically that don't reciprocate doesn't work, clearly. Those people and businesses cry in their milk while they do exactly the same thing. There are no ethics in play here.

But, hey if you want to defend billionaire narcissists that are destroying our planet and trying to take computing freedoms then I guess: you do you.

oth001 7 hours ago||||
Ah yes, OpenAI, the poster child for ethics
blurbleblurble 7 hours ago||||
If only poverty were so simple
dbspin 7 hours ago||
This isn't like stealing from a business. These are individuals most private conversations, potentially including their bank accounts etc. Poverty is no defence - and yes, I've spent a great deal of my life barely scraping by. You'll find poor people are significantly less tolerant of theft, especially from individuals, than rich. Whether that evidences the theft inherent in most forms of wealth generation I'll leave up to the reader.
krkdkfkfkfk 5 hours ago|||
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nullsanity 8 hours ago|||
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thatsabadlook 10 hours ago|||
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.
varispeed 9 hours ago||
Should be given $5-10million under NDA. No headlines.
layer8 9 hours ago|||
The bounty payouts must be public in order to serve as an incentive.
varispeed 6 hours ago|||
That incentive works both ways. For instance employee sneaking in a security hole and then selling it to a mate so they can collect the bounty.
weird-eye-issue 9 hours ago||||
Just imagine what the press would be when somebody breaks that NDA
goodmythical 8 hours ago|||
>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?

darig 8 hours ago||
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dist-epoch 11 hours ago|||
This is a pet peeve of tptacek:

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

dannyw 10 hours ago|||
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.
throwaw12 9 hours ago|||
then server side vulnerabilities should not be reported, instead sell the data, more profitable
petcat 9 hours ago||
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.

pixl97 8 hours ago|||
Don't worry, as more and more people get put of of work by AI the number of people willing to be felons will increase. Hell, they might even become president.
cowlevel 3 hours ago||
The president can't be a felon by definition, because it's legal to do absolutely anything if you're the president.
tadfisher 5 hours ago||||
I am sure this is a crime, but what crime?
throwaw12 7 hours ago|||
I think people who can hack, also know where they can sell it
petcat 7 hours ago||
Anyone can "hack". It's not really a skill anymore.
qup 3 hours ago||
The recent South Korean hacker reportedly wasn't a hacker at all, just asked Claude to handle it.

I'm not that kind of hacker, but I guarantee I could be, complete with an abliterated model on my local rig, in a few minutes. Claude would happily set it all up for me, too.

In reality, I suppose I'm about to keep my rig busy staying ahead of the hackers.

jryle70 9 hours ago|||
OpenAI acknowledging and fixing the bug is worth millions
yeahsure 7 hours ago||
Yeah... idk, sounds like when I was starting out almost 30 years ago my clients constantly lowballed me saying "but think of the exposition! this project will give you" lol
jryle70 7 hours ago||
Were they not right? Just like money giving you some runway but will run out, the exposure is still only a leveler, it's still up to you to take advantage of it.

Also, they were not OpenAI.

varispeed 9 hours ago||
Indeed, it's like "here peasant, have this fortune of $5,000, may it change your life". Pathetic.
siva7 9 hours ago||
that wouldn't be the time worth of many people here to make the security report for OAI..
cowlevel 3 hours ago||
50 hours at $100/hour? To write a straightforward vuln report with AI?
lxgr 11 hours ago||
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

albert_e 8 hours ago|
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

lxgr 3 hours ago||
Sounds similar, but the problem is exactly that I don’t think there’s any way to disconnect such a session, nor to even see that it is connected to my computer in the first place. There’s a small notice when initially starting it on the mac, that’s it.
zahlman 4 hours ago||
Something about the writing style here makes it hard for me to follow what actually happened. The section about JSONP for example seems to be explaining how JSONP works and how it's designed as an attempt to work around these attacks, but that explanation is then passed off as an explanation of how they bypassed the protection. And the whole premise seems to be about how manipulating the Preview content let them work through multiple defensive layers, but I don't see an explanation of how they directly controlled that content in the first place. I would have thought that the only control you have over the content of "an ordinary public ChatGPT share" is the prompt text, and that any migration of that text into "a small working webpage using its Preview feature" is up to the model deciding to generate that "HTML block" in response.
0c3ca83 3 hours ago||
They're writing for bots, not humans. This is a marketing piece. They're trying to get themselves to come up as the answer when people ask chatbots questions.

You're not the target audience of writing on the Internet anymore.

cowlevel 3 hours ago||
It's AI written so of course it's hard to follow.
morgaesis 1 hour ago||
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise.
mediaman 28 minutes ago||
It does if LLMs are generally poor writers, which they currently are, because it is extremely difficult to RLVR essay quality.
dumberquestions 12 hours ago||
Does no one write their own blogs anymore?
trungto 8 hours ago||
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

armcat 9 hours ago|||
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/

bookofjoe 8 hours ago||
[2] https://bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/
lifeisloving 11 hours ago|||
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.
zx8080 11 hours ago||
For who?
loveparade 11 hours ago||
For the LLMs so they get new training data
Kuyawa 8 hours ago||
$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

cbsks 8 hours ago||
I wonder if the new economics of finding bugs means that they pay the amount they think the tokens cost to find it.
aprilthird2021 4 hours ago|||
Makes negative sense. If it were that easy, OpenAI wouldn't have any bugs bc they could just run agents to exploit their own stuff and then fix all their bugs.

This bug could not be found by just asking an AI "find bugs in ChatGPT", that's why it was reported through a bug bounty programs and that's why it should be worth more than $5k

stavros 6 hours ago|||
Over the probability that you'll find something.
tsunamifury 8 hours ago|||
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”
hdjqnd8382bd 8 hours ago||
[flagged]
mannanj 8 hours ago||
actually, your comment is naive. clearly you don't understand game theory and economic incentives. if a company doesn't reward good behavior, you'll see bad behavior.

but then again since you're not naive, you already know these AI companies like openai already act evil and like bad entities.

I conclude therefore, per your words "you are the last one anyone should consult with, basically about anything"

breezybottom 7 hours ago||
Which game theory model specifically applies here?
usernametaken29 11 hours ago||
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.
torben-friis 11 hours ago||
Did you mean exponentially? Logarithmic increase doesn't sound too bad.
dahart 9 hours ago||
I’m sure exponential is what parent meant, but geometric (edit: polynomial) 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.
ebertucc 8 hours ago|||
What's the difference? From what I'm reading online geometric is just the discrete version of exponential
dahart 8 hours ago|||
No difference, you’re right. I meant polynomial not geometric. :P
cowlevel 3 hours ago|||
geometric/polynomial: x^2, x^3, etc

exponential: 2^x, 3^x, etc

Everything in the second group eventually grows faster than everything in the first group, no matter how small and big you make the fixed numbers, so they are two different classes.

dahart 2 hours ago||
Geometric is exponential; I goofed above. Geometric and exponential are sometimes used interchangeably, but sometimes people use geometric to refer to discrete intervals and exponential to refer to continuous functions.
codechicago277 8 hours ago|||
“Square of the lines of code”

Sounds exponential

cowlevel 2 hours ago|||
2 is an exponent but exponential growth means the exponent grows. 2 does not grow, it's always between 1 and 3 (unless you use an AI to do maths).
dahart 8 hours ago||||
That’s quadratic, not exponential. 2^n != n^2
teiferer 6 hours ago||||
And that's why sw eng interviews often have some basic math sprinkled in.
Pannoniae 11 hours ago|||
it's not like microservices fare better, when you introduce them, you've traded a hard problem for a hard problem and distributed computing...
wg0 11 hours ago||
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.

rglover 9 hours ago|||
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.

elendilm 11 hours ago|||
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.

someothherguyy 10 hours ago|||
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.
cowlevel 2 hours ago|||
More abstract code probably results in more high-abstraction-level bugs per LoC, but also less low-abstraction-level bugs so I'd guess it about cancels out to an even rate per LoC.

A single line in C++, Rust or Haskell can have a really subtle logic error. A single line in assembly can't, but it has that same likelihood of having a register allocation error instead, and when you add up all the many lines of assembly you probably still wrote the same number of logic errors as the C++ version.

brazukadev 10 hours ago|||
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).
latexr 9 hours ago|||
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
pessimizer 7 hours ago||
> Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it?

What's the joke? They're literally saying, every day, that this is true to a civilization endangering extent. They're making demands based on this, and politicians are taking up those demands.

And now they're paying bullshit $5K bug bounties for account-stealing exploits on their own platform. They should have paid more just the make the bug seem more grandiose; I don't know who let them get away with this - this is what happens when CEOs run their own PR I guess. It's basically an public announcement that they're total fakes.

hridyaagrawal 4 hours ago||
$5000 is a joke for a "P1" vuln
itsafarqueue 4 hours ago|
My theory is vulns will never pay out big especially now, no matter how serious. Imagine they paid out $50k+ — it’d spawn an industry doing nothing but.
verteu 3 hours ago||
For a company that truly cares about secure software, that seems like an ideal outcome.
6thbit 10 hours ago||
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.

joshuamoyers 3 hours ago||
unrelated to this, but this company randomly reached out disclosing a vulnerability to us (test environment, synthetic tenant). on the one hand, thank you, it’s patched. on the other - we do not have a bug bounty program and this is not welcome. having agent swarms randomly breaking in to environments and then marketing their services in the disclosure is not an ideal sales tactic, in addition to being illegal.
uniq7 3 hours ago|
I don't want to defend them, but the alternative is that they do nothing and you don't know about the vulnerability until a bad actor exploits it (something easy and cheap nowadays).

I'm confused, would you welcome that more?

jwpapi 7 hours ago|
I think there was another HN discussion about it re bounty value and as far as I remember the issue is not that big companies are greedy in that case, but rather that over time it’s strategically better to have lower bounties so less people are interested in it.

5 or 50k doesnt matter to them. And this bug in terms of severity is very high imho.

aprilthird2021 4 hours ago|
But couldn't they just turn around and sell this hackers for much more money?
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