We Took over ChatGPT Accounts

(parameter.ai)

90 points | by armcat 3 hours ago

11 comments

  • 6thbit 2 minutes 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.

  • yellow_lead 1 hour 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.

    • thatsabadlook 29 minutes 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.
    • dist-epoch 1 hour ago
      This is a pet peeve of tptacek:

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

      • dannyw 27 minutes 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.
  • jareklupinski 2 hours ago
    > 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

    • kro 1 hour ago
      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.

    • TobTobXX 1 hour ago
      ... 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...

      • Antipode 32 minutes ago
        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.
    • dist-epoch 1 hour ago
      I wanted to check your website from your profile, but then I remembered your advice. Thanks!, dodged a potential bullet
    • bossyTeacher 1 hour ago
      Also many emails from tech companies today:

      - "sign in via one-time code."

      - "Click here to see our latest update".

      • jareklupinski 1 hour ago
        dont click links

        250k refresher fee

        • pkthunder 15 minutes ago
          Click this link to be told not to click links.
        • atrokhymchuk 1 hour ago
          hey, don't dump the market
      • kotaKat 1 hour ago
        "Scan this QR code!"
    • Razengan 1 hour ago
      Thanks! Here, click on this link to get paid
    • gib444 1 hour ago
      [dead]
  • usernametaken29 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      Did you mean exponentially? Logarithmic increase doesn't sound too bad.
    • Pannoniae 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

    • elendilm 1 hour 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 35 minutes 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.
        • brazukadev 19 minutes 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).
  • dumberquestions 2 hours ago
    Does no one write their own blogs anymore?
    • zx8080 1 hour ago
      For who?
      • loveparade 1 hour ago
        For the LLMs so they get new training data
    • lifeisloving 1 hour 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.
  • lxgr 1 hour 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

  • atrokhymchuk 1 hour ago
    if only they had some sort of cybersecurity state of the art thing...
  • marwaneet 1 hour ago
    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.
    • brabel 9 minutes ago
      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??
    • steve1977 1 hour ago
      Production scale is not production grade I guess...
  • 15o9o 3 hours ago
    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?
    • qup 6 minutes ago
      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.

    • chamomeal 25 minutes ago
      Been sayin this for years. Everybody in the world world: just BE COOL. Solves like every internet problem at once.
    • dataviz1000 1 hour ago
      > please don’t login as me

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

  • monster_truck 38 minutes ago
    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)

  • msarda_23 7 minutes ago
    [flagged]